Personal Care Brand Elevates Soap's Packaging to Maintain Freshness

White soap bars on wooden deck in bathroom, closeup
Never under estimate the power of great packaging.
In an effort to be more sustainable, New York based, multinational personal care and household products company was looking to optimize its larger, multi-pack packaging for one of its soap-bar brands, while maintaining the freshness of each soap bar.

Impact

The client optimized their packaging prior to launch saving time to market and over 23% in cost in production.

Our Approach

To explore consumer opinion of the new packaging ideas for acceptability and overall feasibility, Curion utilized its Sensory Packaging Preference (S2P™) methodology. A series of highly engaging focus groups were conducted in which consumers not only spoke about their attitudes, behaviors, likes and dislikes with soap packaging, but also demonstrated these through interactions with the prototypes.

Step 1

Select Test Audience

Panelists were recruited who purchased multipacks of bar soaps in the past year

Step 2

Define Samples

3 new packaging prototypes were
presented and compared to current packaging

Step 3

Collect Insights

Utilized qualitative methodology to gain insights into the packaging’s acceptability and feasibility

Step 4

Uncover Behaviors

Captured observations of participants interacting and evaluating each functionality

Insights

Uncovered optimizations and drawbacks to the new packaging prototypes, and gained insights into general consumer usage behavior.

  • Packaging that preserved each bar was preferred and perceived as maintaining the freshness.
  • Reinforced messaging of sustainability on the package was perceived more sustainable.
  • Packaging needed to be easy to store, simple to stack, and able to identify the number of bars remaining.
  • Men preferred packaging that was easy to unwrap and could be unwrapped in the shower.

Results

Our client was able to utilize recommendations based on consumers feedback to confidently make optimizations to their multi-pack packaging prototypes prior to their next phase of testing. Thus, saving them time and money that would have been wasted if they had gone straight to market or to the next phase of testing.