I stood in the ironmongers (yes, they still exist) alongside my Dad the other week and he announced that they must have run out of his preferred brand of floor polish, Klear.
In fact, it was there on the shelf, but in the space of twelve months they’d gone from this:
to this
to this
And since my Dad was entirely unaware of this he was looking at a white bottle of Pledge with a handle and never imagined it was actually the clear Klear floor polish he was after. The jump was just too big, especially for a product such as Klear that in his house is a seasonal purchase for balcony tile polishing purposes. Its all very well massively changing both your packaging and design if you communicate this properly at shelf or bring your customers with you in a graduated roll-out, but if they purchase seasonally they might well miss the interim stage, meaning you lose them to a competitor.
I wish we still had one of the old bottles of Klear, because they’re going for £25 on ebay as all the model makers who relied on it as a thin varnish think its been discontinued…