When it comes to Australian food manufacturers, sometimes it pays to get all clingy with your packaging.
After last November, when Glad Cling Wrap decided to change the wrapping cutter bar on their dispenser carton from a bottom to a top-of-carton configuration, the company was inundated with complaints and annoyed calls from customers who, it is said, preferred the original bottom-dwelling cutter design.
According to Megan Francis, Glad Cling Wrap Marketing Manager, the company was flooded with calls and complaints across both their web and social sites as well as via direct calls to their consumer hotline.
“We were getting at least 50 calls a day about the cutter bar at one stage,” said Francis.
Truth be told, the removal of the bottom cutter bar has proven to be a somewhat painful move for novice cling wrappers (such as myself), which then begs the question as to why the company would bother changing a highly successful and decades old design.
Fast forward to June 2015 and its seems Glad Cling Wrap has seen the errors of its ways and decided not only to atone for its egregious packaging design sins and change back to the old, bottom-placed cutter bar design, but also to incorporate this into a wider, somewhat more engaging public campaign complete with social media blitz, rebranding and the ubiquitous use of a familiar consumer engagement campaign.
According to Megan Francis, “Since we told Australia the cutter bar would return to its prime position on the base of the box, we have received an extremely positive response from our consumers with everyone noting how glad they were…”
Dubbed the ‘Random Acts of Glad’, the campaign is encouraging all users (and dare I say, lovers) of Glad Cling Wrap for the next 30 days to post messages and stories of what makes them glad (or happy) on the so-called ‘Great Wall of Glad’ situated at Westfield in Sydney’s CBD and at Parramatta or digitally via the product web site (www.gladeveryday.glad.com.au) and/or Twitter feed (#gladeveryday).
Said Francis: “If a household product like Glad Cling Wrap can inspire feelings of gratitude and happiness, we know there are plenty more things in life that are making Australians glad every day.”
As a marketing idea it is both predictable and quirky at the same time, however as a cross-platform rebranding exercise, it is garnering pallet-loads of near-priceless advertising.
Perhaps then the lesson for Australia’s food manufacturers here is crystal clear: if out of a misguided sense of product re-development or maybe just sheer boredom you end up redesigning (read: wrecking) a staple brand that has become almost eponymous with everyday life, then there is always a way to fix it thanks to the omni-channel digital world we now live in.
And aren’t we all glad for that!