The unboxing experience. Most have heard about, but many are not fully aware of the importance of this opportunity to gain brand awareness. The unboxing experience is the step-by-step ritual of opening and unpacking a new purchase. When the process is particularly memorable, the experience may also be captured in photos or videos for the recipient to share on social media with others. They could be unboxing beer, wine, cider or stocking caps for dogs. The point is, most direct to consumer brands are catering their shipments for this opportunity to showcase their brand, no matter what product they are shipping. This is why we came out with a line of Pods to enhance the unboxing experience, called Unboxing Pods.
Unboxing experiences are different from regular ecommerce deliveries. It’s an immersive, experiential branding exercise that’s designed to surprise and delight customers during the post-purchase stage. Through simple things like custom branded packaging, businesses can make customers feel more emotionally invested in their brand and more likely to buy from them in the future. Think about it, if you received a shipment of beverages you ordered online, would you be more impressed by a plain old cardboard box, or custom branded, colorful packaging that showcased the product and brand?
Once what seemed like only large high end brands selling expensive items, unboxing experiences have fast become the go to in DTC companies of any size, resulting positive customer experiences and increased brand awareness in the age of ecommerce. Many brands (both beverage and non beverage) are now catering to these enhanced customer experience. Stone Brewing often uses custom boxes to send their limited release beers to influencers. Non beverage companies like Shinola use custom boxes to ship their watches in, and even big box stores like Target and Amazon are now using fancier packaging on some of their products, in hopes of getting unboxing videos to go viral on youtube.
Today’s consumers expect brands to pull out all the stops to make the end-to-end ecommerce shopping journey enjoyable – and the final step is the delivery experience. Where they were once satisfied by online direct to consumer orders being accurate and on time, they now crave (and often demand) that ‘wow factor’ to make their interactions with a brand exciting and enjoyable. It’s a win win situation for both the consumer and brand.
