A BIG Problem for Nearly All Companies.

 I love this kid and love this video. It is a perfect illustration of what I have seen over and over and over again with nearly all companies large and small. The company has a problem but they are unable to see the solution. Most of the time it is right in from of them. Sometimes the most valuable part of working with a company like SHELF is having a partner that can see your operations, packaging and customers from a fresh and different perspective. Many times branding firms want to pretend how smart they are when in reality they aren't any smarter than the client but just come at the problem unbiased and looking from a different vantage point. 

Here are some other examples of this:
1: Designers can't proofread. It isn't that they don't know what is wrong or right but they are so close to the artwork that their mind auto-completes the words instead of actually reading them.

2: In your home you have a pile of something (books, papers, clothes) and if they stay there long enough you eventually don't even notice them. They just become part of your life. If you go on a trip for a week or two and come back they stand out like a sore thumb. You want to get them put away.

3: Your packaging is no longer connecting with consumers. What happened? We haven't changed anything. We are working harder than ever and sales are going down. There is oftentimes one small adjustment that needs made and sales will grow 10X. I remember one client we had several years ago had a great product but poor packaging. Grocers would lay the product on it's side instead of facing it up on the shelf. We had a small budget. We redesigned the packaging to highlight the product better and sales increased 900% the first year, another 825% the second year and 700% more the third year. It was picked up by Sam's Club US, followed by Sam's Club Canada and Sam's Club Mexico. This less than $10,000 investment literally translated to millions of dollars in sales. That was a worthy investment.

The moral of the story is have people that aren't in the day-to-day part of your business to review your operations, products, packaging and your target consumers. It isn't that they are smarter, or more knowledgeable about your product, it's that they are outside looking in. Sometimes the solution is easy to see and inexpensive to fix with an unbiased perspective.