At 15 October 2005, 02:08 PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
We already have a proliferation of sizes. I've seen 500 g and 454 g pasta
packages on the same shelf and two bottles of water, one a round number of
fluid ounces and the other metric, from the same company. I think what we
need is some litership ;)
This brings up an interesting point: two or three years ago I was in
the local supermarket (Smith's, now owned by Fred Meyer), and was
somewhat taken aback when I actually thought about the number of
different packages of toothpaste in that aisle.
There were variations in:
manufacturer (Colgate, Crest, private labels, etc.)
"purpose" (whitening, sensitive teeth, etc.)
taste (mint, regular, etc.)
size (travel, home, family, etc.)
tube variations (screw top, flip top, etc.)
package variations (tube, dispenser, etc.)
I stopped counting the different items when I hit 100; total was
probably 150 or so.
Now, ask yourself: how many people can tell you the size of the tube
of toothpaste they buy? I don't mean something like "travel size,"
but something specific like "3 oz" or "50 g". I doubt 1% of the
population can answer this question. I can't.
There are eleven people here at QSI today (yes, on Saturday) and I
just ran around and asked each of them. Ten had no idea, or just said
"the big tube" or something like that. One actually said "The six
ounce tube." But, she was an executive at Proctor & Gamble (Colgate
brand) for 20+ years, and so is a bit more attuned to such things
than most of us.
So I would suggest that a toothpaste company packaging its toothpaste
in hard metric sizes (e.g., 100 g [3.4 oz]) cannot possibly be a
detriment in the consumer's mind, since the consumer will not notice it!
And the unit of measure cannot be very important from a marketing
standpoint, because if it was there would not likely be such a
variety of other marketing angles to a single product.
Now, how do we get a consumer products manufacturer to realize they
can switch at least some items to metric-size packages and NOT suffer
any consequences? Plus realize the benefits of having the same
package sizes all over the world.
Jim Elwell
Jim Elwell, CAMS
Electrical Engineer
Industrial manufacturing manager
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
www.qsicorp.com
