Unboxing an Apple Device: An Unparalleled Experience
I hate boxes, I will keep this one.
If you know me, you know I hate boxes. My apologies to all package designers — it’s not you, it’s me.
Just in case this article reaches more people than my family members, let me explain.
My husband and I spent a decade living abroad, moving from place to place, from house to house. Every time we bought some expensive device, his first thought was, “This will end up in a cargo container at some point.” And what better way to transport them than in their original boxes, specifically designed for this purpose. Over time, we ended up accumulating way too many boxes. Only mentioning it gives me unrest. I hate clutter. I hate boxes.
With Christmas being around the corner, the season of… you guessed it, “even more boxes” is here. Luckily, we are finally settled in one location, so I can merrily recycle. Every. Single. Box.
But one.
Recently, I purchased a Mac mini and found myself holding onto the box. As a marketer and an economist, I found the clash between my thoughts and actions peculiar. But is it?
Before we reach a consensus on keeping the box, let’s discuss something we all agree on. We love unboxing.
The psychology behind unboxing
The unbeatable sense of anticipation and the surprise element of what is to be found inside the box are key drivers of the unboxing mania.
Give a child a box, and watch them rip it apart.
Give a grown-up a box, and watch them take an unboxing video.
Between January to November 2023 alone, there have been more than 25 billion YouTube views of videos with “unboxing” in the title.
If there is anything better than watching someone unbox, it is to do it yourself. Smart entrepreneurs understood this human desire and capitalized on it with the popular subscription box business model. In 2023 the global subscription box market size reached an impressive $32.9 billion.
This is what the dopamine rush does to people. But no one seems to understand this better than Apple.
Why are Apple boxes so hard to part with?
If you ask anyone for an explanation on why they keep the Apple box, chances are you will hear a seemingly rational explanation. They kept the box for higher resale value. We always have rational explanations for our irrational actions, don’t we?
The truth is, we keep the box because it is simply an extension of a brilliant product. And we bought this product because we believe it is an extension of us. It symbolizes our creativity, innovation, and brilliance — an extension of who we are.
A remarkable marketing story in practice. A visionary adopted a business-savvy expert’s advice and found the perfect executor.
Since Apple’s early days, when Mike Markkula (the business-savvy expert) wrote “The Apple Marketing Philosophy”, emphasizing empathy, focus, and impute, these have remained the three guiding marketing principles of the company up to date.
“Impute” implies that people form an opinion about your product and company based on signals they convey. Markkula understood that humans naturally judge a book by its cover. As he shared in the bestselling biography “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson:
“We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
Steve Jobs (the visionary) remained faithful to this leading marketing principle and admitted:
“When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product. Mike taught me that.”
Nobody understood the importance of the impute principle better than Jony Ive (the perfect executor), the designer of Apple’s most iconic products, like the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone. And, of course, their boxes. This is what Ive shared about their package designing journey:
“Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging. I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”
This alignment of vision, expert knowledge, and execution between three great minds — Markkula, Jobs, and Ive — created an unparalleled unboxing experience and a package we can’t part with. It is that simple.
With Steve Jobs long gone and Jony Ive no longer with the company, all we can hope is for Apple to keep on their spirit of unbeatable experience at every customer touch point.
If you find this article thought-provoking, I look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn. I share bite-size branding and marketing insights there every week.
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