Are Consumers Impressed With Sure Compressed?

Unilever’s recent and well publicized roll out of compressed versions of Sure, Vaseline and Dove deodorants certainly created a stir in the UK packaging and marketing community. 

Unilever’s recent and well publicized roll out of compressed versions of Sure, Vaseline and Dove deodorants certainly created a stir in the UK packaging and marketing community.  With about half of the UK deodorant market at risk, this was seen by some as a bold and assertive move by the Anglo–Dutch consumer goods company. Unilever has evidently invested a lot of resource to ensure the effective communication of the switch to the new smaller size. There is a stand-alone website as well as a video campaign available on YouTube and you couldn’t miss the point of sale communication in store when the products first hit the shelf. Is this a responsible move that is in the best interests of the environment and also yielding added consumer convenience into the making? Or could this initiative be seen more cynically as purely one that drives down packaging and distribution costs in pursuit of higher profit margins? How will consumers process the bold and possibly ‘magical’ claim that 75ml of product will actually last as long as their previous 150ml version? Is this something that consumers will buy into? Were sufficiently intrigued at ThePackHub to conduct our own consumer research to find out more. have again used our innovative ThePackHub CSIinsight platform to see what impact the change had on consumers. ThePackHub CSI is one of a range of packaging specific consumer research tools. It’s a smart phone app that delivers fast and relevant insights on a range of packaging innovation issues. On this occasion, asked new users of the compressed size what they thought of the reduction and why they thought the change had been made. Our results were on the whole encouraging.  The launch would appear to have been a smart move with the majority of consumers positively embracing the size reduction. The communication of the size change has been embraced and the reasons for doing it well understood.

Source: The Pack Hub