Staples
"We wanted to make the shopping experience easy, and to do that we had to fundamentally rethink the packaging and the makeup of the line itself. The insights from Affinnova helped us figure out how to get existing paper customers to trade up, and also gave us the opportunity to get people already in our stores to buy paper."
- Andrew Schneider
Director of Strategic Planning
Staples
Headquarters: Framingham, MA
Target Market: USA
Optimization: Packaging
www.staples.com
Pushing Paper
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Staples undertook a packaging redesign initiative to improve the consumer appeal of its line of paper products. With Affinnova’s help, Staples was able to sort through millions of ideas and develop packaging that greatly improved purchase intent.
CHALLENGE
Staples, the world’s largest office products company, provides products, services and expertise in the categories of office supplies, technology, furniture, copy & print and cleaning and breakroom. With 90,000 associates worldwide, Staples has a presence in more than 26 countries throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Staples branded paper, which accounted for 42% of category sales, needed a redesign, but this was complicated by two industry trends. The first was the need for eco-labeling of paper to show the percent recycled. The second was that paper was being sold for specific machines and purposes.
SOLUTION
Instead of the traditional approach of focus groups, the Staples team worked with Affinnova and its evolutionary optimization technology, IDDEA, which enabled them to test 22,000 packaging options directly with consumers to determine their preferences. By looking at selections over multiple generations and across the whole panel, the software identified preference patterns — a tendency toward a certain color or font or wording — and ultimately identified the top concepts.
SUCCESS
The results were eye-opening and as a result of the study, the team made several changes. Instead of using the traditional green packaging of its recycled papers, they incorporated the eco-offerings into the regular line which is packaged in red (basic), blue (midrange), or gold (premium) with a simple green band across the top that indicated the percent of recycled content. They added a large triangular recycling icon just below the paper type, reiterating its environmental credentials. As well, they learned that customers preferred the word “multipurpose” to “multiuse” and they remarketed their premium gold line with “machine specific” options.
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