THE UGLY: Lucas’ Paw Paw Ointment
Lucas’ Paw Paw ointment is very well known to girls around Australia. Personally I bought it the first time because my friends were using it and I loved it! Typically used as a lip balm to the common girl, it has a wide variety of uses. Fantastic product, but in terrible packaging! I don’t find that it suits the target market, is not appealing, and lacks usability. For those who do use it, I think you will agree that you either squeeze out too much or not enough, and when you get to the end of the bottle, it is a mission! I feel like it can be passed off as a ‘homebrand’ like product by the way it looks.
After researching what Lucas’ Paw Paw is actually for, it became clear that as it is such a versatile product, that it has been placed with different consumer goods in different environments. My first environment of choice was Woolworths grocery store. I captured an image below of the environment I am about to describe. Placed in the beauty aisle, this brand is placed on the same shelf as ‘hand cream’. With lip balms placed in the shelf above and generic moisturiser placed on the shelf below. Standing out as the package as we currently know it is red. But as I am a consumer of this product who uses it for lip balm, found it very odd placing. This did give me a few ideas on how to redesign the package however to clarify what it is actually made for, but can be used in other ways.
The second environment I selected was Amcal Chemist, where oddly again, it was placed right at the front of the chemist with the baby items! Surrounding it this time was products like Vaseline, nappy rash cream, hand cream and other baby care items. This didn’t help me with an idea on how to recreate the package, as I felt it was unrelated to the surrounding products in this environment, therefore not suiting the target market and did take me a while to find the location.
I feel like the package needs to be much more user friendly then a tub or tube. Other examples included angled-end tubes (to make it easier to smear), push pump (similar to what foundation is stored in) and lip balm sticks.