Eco-friendly intentions are good. But if the customer isn’t happy, then it’s back to the drawing board.
Sun Chips set out to save the planet but ignored an important part of the customer experience. The result was deafening.
As a strategist and thought leader in the sound in marketing space, this case study has always grabbed my attention. It’s an unusual cautionary tale wrapped up with a good sense of humor. I share this example with clients as proof that strategic sound truly does matter. The last thing they want is to lose revenue and customers over a distracting sound.
Case in point, Sun Chips lost a lot of money over a silly bag design flaw.
Too noisy to taste
In 2010, Sun Chips created a bag that was 100% compostable. They said the bag would biodegrade within two weeks in a landfill, which is amazing!
However, it was loud. Too loud.
Apparently, touching, opening, and basically manipulating the bag in any way was recorded as making 95 decibels of sound to the regular bag’s 60–70. To put that in perspective, a pilot had said the bag was noisier than his cockpit!
Think that’s an exaggeration? Here’s a quick video of someone handling the bag.
Customers started weighing in on social media. It wasn’t sounding good.
The now-discontinued Facebook page “SORRY BUT I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THIS SUN CHIPS BAG” got more than 49,000 likes at the height of the story.
The Google search phrase ‘sun chips bag too loud”, had 149,000 results. PepsiCo even poked fun at themselves when launching in Canada. They released ads saying, “If the bag is too loud for you, we’d be happy to send you earplugs”.
A similar sentiment was shared on this Reddit strand.
Ultimately, Sun Chips scrapped the bag (pun intended) and created a less noisy but still biodegradable bag for a 2011 launch.
Saving the planet with eco-friendly materials created a user experience problem- noise pollution.
Sound creates decisions and inspires action
Sound is our compass in life. It helps us perceive the world. It connects us with the subject of the sound. This connection then determines how we ‘feel’ about it and how we should respond. In the case of food, the sound it makes interprets what it should taste like. When the sound doesn’t match expectations, it feels ‘wrong’ and our brain labels it as ‘bad’.
Too much sound can also hurt us. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASLHA), excessive noise not only causes hearing loss but it can also affect our health. These health effects range from elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, and an upset tummy to name a few. It can also result in just feeling flat-out cranky about the whole situation.
However, since the dawn of the chip, people have perceived its freshness by its crunch. If someone reaches into a bag of chips and bites down on a soggy or silent chip, they’d consider it stale or no good.
So if opening a bag of chips is part of that crunchy experience, why wouldn’t a loud bag transmit freshness?
It’s a balancing act
Like everything else in this world, there can be too much of a good thing. In the case of the Sun Chip bag, the sound overstimulated the users’ senses and ruined their experience. It overpowered everything and confused the brain’s interpretation of what was ‘correct’.
With this idea in mind, think about advertising in general. The average thirty-minute show has about eight minutes of commercials. In a thirty-minute podcast, there could be around three to four minutes of ads. These ads are already an interruption to the user’s regularly scheduled programming.
Every brand that advertises needs to recognize that their messaging will initially be received as a “noise nuisance”. It’s up to them to find a way to advertise unobtrusively.
If the brand wants to get the user’s attention, it needs to be alluring, engaging, convincing, and memorable. This is done with things like humor or intrigue; by pulling at the heartstrings, or making the user cringe. By using descriptive adjectives to connect to the senses, an ad cuts through the noise and gives the user a reason to pay attention.
Resonating harmoniously
Touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell are all core senses that we use to create personality and preference. Brands can use these core senses to do the same. However, too much of anything can be overwhelming.
Using a well-balanced diet of harmonious sensory marketing makes a brand more human. It gives the user a reason to feel the way the brand intends for them to feel.
When done right, sound in marketing is a brand’s best friend. When done wrong, it becomes a brand’s worst nightmare.
Perhaps the factory was too loud and drowned out the sound of the bag during production. Or maybe they skipped the test groups because they’d hit such a grand slam in their own expectations. Whatever the case may have been, one thing was clear.
The Sun Chips bag design wasn’t harmonious with the experience.
We all make mistakes
All was not lost for Sun Chips. Through the bag debacle, they received a lot of organic publicity. This publicity was managed with a good sense of humor and their willingness to poke fun at themselves a little bit. All press is good press as they say.
What it really comes down to is that we’re all only human. We all make mistakes at one point or another. Sun Chips and PepsiCo got a lesson in user experience that they won’t be forgetting anytime soon. The blunder also provided the bag a taste of humanity by reaching a very human outcome, imperfection.
What other brands can learn from Sun Chips’ sound in marketing mistake.
Sun Chips’ plan to create a fully biodegradable bag was a great idea. However, they missed the mark and forgot about the customer’s experience. The result was a dip in revenue of 11%.
The mistake that Sun Chips made was to not experience their product alongside their consumer. If they had taken the time to actually handle the bag during beta testing, they would have come to the same conclusion as everyone else. The bag was too loud and would never do well in the market. This conclusion would have saved them a lot of time, money, and bad press.
They still saved the planet, it just took a little longer. They discovered the problem could be fixed by using a different adhesive to hold together the different bag layers. This softened the sound and reinvigorated sales.
Experience is everything and although a “loud bag” seems silly, it matters. Sound in marketing and branding matters. It absolutely must be made “on purpose” every single time.
