user-friendly (2): Caps and Covers

Caps & Covers

User-friendly: Toothpaste cap has an extra feature – a flip-top opening that really saves you precious seconds when you are in a rush. Not User-friendly: Mayonnaise bottle cover is so tight and cannot be opened. Disaster: Because it was so difficult to open, the covered bottle falls to the floor and breaks! Delikado: The 1.5 liter soda’s ‘easy” metal cap is sharp. Cut my finger once. Cute: Gerber, Gatorade bottle caps pop when opened. Kids play with it –because of the sound it makes when pressed. The bottle and the cap are both recyclable. Delightful: the wrappers of turrones de casoy and White Rabbit candies are edible.

The quality and design of the cap or cover of a product is often an important if not a crucial element of the product itself, like in food products that easily spoil after opening. In baby food, for instance, one can tell if the product has been tampered with, is still good, or already spoiled just by looking at the cap or cover. After all, feeding babies with spoiled food could have very serious consequences. But even with otherwise ordinary products, like caps of toothpaste and shampoo bottles, creative marketers have come up with more user-friendly features that could provide crucial differentiation translating into increased sales. If the competing brands are equally good, the bottle with a more user-friendly cap will have an advantage. Who would have thought that a toothpaste cap can still be improved? It used to be perfect. But with the added flip-top cap, the old cap without the feature suddenly became less than perfect, if not inconvenient. Sometimes the user-friendly features increase the cost of the product. Like Vienna sausage in the easy-open can, or canned drinks. (Right now, a bottle of beer costs less than P20.00 in the supermarket, but the same amount of the same beer in the more user-friendly aluminum can costs more than P20.00.) Despite added costs, however, many people still buy these products. In other words, the user-friendliness of a product increases its value. Does making a product or service user-friendly always entail extra cost? I don’t think so, although I couldn’t think of an example right now. Sometimes though, it is not really the fault of the manufacturer as in the case of the mayonnaise bottle I mentioned earlier. The make and the tightness of the bottle cover could be a necessary feature to ensure the quality (e.g. freshness) of the product. What the consumer needs is knowledge of certain techniques using readily available materials. For instance, until now, I still have those flat rubber cords that I used in making my slingshots when I was a kid. I learned sometime ago that it’s the best tool for opening bottles such as stubborn mayonnaise bottle caps. One of the most annoying sealing mechanisms I continue to put up with is adhesive tape that many grocery stores use to seal plastic packs. This one-centimeter wide colored tape is very user-friendly to the grocer because it comes with a dispenser. When I buy some vegetables, for instance, the grocer simply pulls together the open end of the plastic bag and ‘dips’ it into the tape dispenser. In less than a second, the vegetables are neatly sealed. The problem is when I get home and start opening the bag. Unless I have a pair of scissor or a knife beside me, my blood pressure begins to rise as I struggle to disentangle the crazy adhesive in the plastic bag that comes between me and my veggies!