This Heinz Tomato Ketchup photo is making the rounds on most social channels and is being touted as the perfect illustration of Customer Experience. Smart CX professionals know better.
Although the bottle design changes are easy to see, understand, and use, this is not an illustration of fabulous customer experience. Why?
Customer experience, by its very nature, is about the whole experience not any one individual component of an experience.
In this case, Heinz has offered a packaging change that could help customers use product easier, which many of their customers may have told Heinz they want based on surveys and research.
Additionally, the new PET plastic used to create the bottle (in partnership with Coca Cola) is in large-part plant-based and recyclable, it is lighter so costs less to ship, there is less in-shipment breakage, and these plastic bottles probably (not confirmed) cost less to produce. Sounds like several wins, right?
But, is yet another plastic bottle in the market desirable given that many of these end up in landfills or floating in our oceans, do chemicals leach from these bottles into product and anyone who ingests product, and why would anyone want to go from an easily recyclable glass bottle to a plastic bottle that is less easy to recycle? The number of wins is dropping.
This ketchup’s ingredients, taken from their corporate website, include:
INGREDIENTS: TOMATO CONCENTRATE FROM RED RIPE TOMATOES, DISTILLED VINEGAR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CORN SYRUP, SALT, SPICE, ONION POWDER, NATURAL FLAVORING.
KOSHER PAREVE
GLUTEN-FREE
Two ingredients listed here, corn syrup-based, are becoming more and more publicly controversial, plus there are undefined spices and undefined flavoring as well. Likewise, distilled vinegar leaches from any container it is stored in, glass being the safest container with the least amount of leaching. More wins lost.
With this photo being so widely shared, I question how customer experience professionals really define customer experience. For example:
- What helps drive increased revenue and brand loyalty? Is it just easy to use packaging or something else?
- Was this the best use of company resources or could they have created an even better experience (and increased revenue) by improving the product instead of or in conjunction with their packaging?
- Will the savings gained by moving to plastic containers be passed along to customers?
- Are these new plastic containers safe given the product that is stored in them and are there future liabilities waiting to happen?
- How many components of a customer experience does a company need to deliver simultaneously to ensure for a whole positive experience; creating value for both entities?
- Do customers want companies to provide them with healthy products, both from an ingredient perspective as well as from a packaging perspective?
I wonder how many of us succumb to the internal corporate pressure of revenue gains positioned as improving customer experiences as opposed to creating fabulous customer experiences which ultimately lead to revenue gains.
Maybe The Ultimate Question is really “Would you encourage your kids or mother to eat/use this product?” instead of “Would you recommend?”.
The disclaimer. This post is simply meant to offer thinking to CX professionals using a live illustration of some group think floating around on the web at the moment. This post is NOT meant as +/- commentary about Heinz or its products. Likewise, I have no personal or financial interest in Heinz.
