The treacherous world of product design

I'm not saying that packaging designers have an easy job, making whatever random crap look appealing enough for we consumer/sheep to pick out of a lineup and dump en mass into our shopping carts. Very few people realize the intricate psychological workings that they construct into the smallest of products. Millions of dollars of market research goes into trying to predict if the average consumer will react favorably to the unique look that you give your product to separate it from the morass of crap on the market.

Now, I am in no way the target consumer for Avon Derma-Full X3, in as much as I am not a woman concerned with covering or reducing wrinkles, and spend less than the price of their product annually on cosmetic products. So it is no surprise that their marketing and product designers missed their mark with me.

So, having babbled for a wee bit, does that bottle remind anyone else of the T-Virus from the Resident Evil movie?

Luckily there are very few women over forty who ever saw Resident Evil, and of that very specific subset, I doubt seriously that they are also Avon consumers. But those persnickety unforseen implications that you try hard to avoid in your marketing really seem to have reared their head in this product launch.

Come on, you have a product that is designed to keep the face from showing the ravages of time, essentially trying to achieve eternal vigor, and you put it in the same container as a fictional virus intended to regenerate people but ends up making them zombies?

I'm going to let you ponder the implications for both zombie fiction and modern cosmetics, and hold my tongue to avoid a libel suit.

So, that's what I immediately thought upon seeing the ad. Marketing campaign UBER-FAIL.

P.S. Happy St. Patrick's to All, the second drunkest holiday of the year.

tags: avon  x3  zombie  virus  tvirus  resident  evil  marketing  campaign  package  design  product  fail  

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