Reliving the Experience

What did it mean to say "the demand" for a product when so much had become the appeal of the packaging?  (as I write this it is not applicable to the  current mad demand for toilet paper!!)  What was meant by the "desire to buy" when every 14 minutes a decision was made in the supermarket to purchase by desire?

Packaging, by the end of the 19th century still meant only the means to protect a product, but by the 20th century it was a thing into itself.  Where did the package end and the product begin?  A good product was not enough, a package had to stimulate desire in a consumer.  According to Dr. Ernest Dichter, a marketing psychoanalyst (?), said in 1961 "that because American products are of uniform and high quality, there is little difference from one brand to the other and American spend their money on the psychological differences."

Like photographs and phonographs, American were about repeatable experiences - reliving the experience by sight or sound.  So packaging had to create a repeatable experience where the consumer believed that a certain product would always create that same experience as before - the same clean smell, that same delicious taste, etc. (NOTE:  I am not condoning the ad to the right...I grew up in a time that doctors did smoke, including mine.)

The question then became would the same experience be desirable in a different package?  brighter colors? a different size? on a different shelf next to another product?  The product without a brand name that had dominated stores prior to 1900 was gone.  Now everything had a name, and products were purchased because of that name on the package.  That name was familiar from ads, TV and print. 

Packaging had a new strategy, a strategy that took it from the simple paper bag to a science of psychological marketing.  Pretty remarkable!!

Next time...thus the ends of the series on the package.  a new direction of which I have not decided yet is next! 
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Today in Pioneer History: "On March 23, 1839, the word 'OK' enters the national vernacular when it is first published in the Boston Morning Post.  It was meant to be an abbreviation for "all correct" after a popular song at the time.  It steadily made its way into the everyday speech of all Americans.