Lifting the Lid on Mayver’s Pack Redesign

2023 was a big year for Australian peanut butter brand, Mayver’s. The relative newcomer launched a number of mouth-watering variants (and even a range of dog treats!) together with switching to 100% Australian peanuts. This all helped the brand notch its highest ever share of the natural peanut butter category in the final quarter of the year. However, it was a pack redesign of the core range that caused the biggest stir — amongst the expressive circles of the LinkedIn marketing community, that is.

Despite the new design having sat comfortably on supermarket shelves for a number of months now, a colorful discussion took place recently around its merits. While some sung its praises, others (audaciously) requested the author supply evidence to substantiate their opinion. Well, thankfully here at Cubery that’s our bread and peanut butter.

With our business being all about providing fast and robust insights to help clients make informed and confident marketing decisions, we took the opportunity to test the old and new pack designs amongst mutually exclusive groups of peanut butter consumers. After all, the opinion of the consumer is the only one marketers should ultimately be concerned with.

But before we dive in, there’s one important caveat when it comes to packaging research. The psychological tendency of humans is to gravitate toward the familiar, meaning that research will generally favor the status quo. In simple terms this means a new packaging design will rarely exceed the benchmark set by the incumbent; thus, by simply matching the predecessor on key performance dimensions it’s a win. And in Mayver’s case that’s exactly what they did.

With shoppers spending little time at shelf weighing up alternatives, the quicker you’re seen and recognized, the more likely you’ll be bought — it’s as simple as that. In this respect, the new Mayver’s pack maintained many of the brand’s most familiar design elements, thus ensuring its recognizability wasn’t compromised. It could best be described as a thoughtful evolution rather than confusing revolution. What’s more, the redesign also stayed true to the brand’s personality, maintaining perceptions of goodness and natural ingredients while elevating Australian-made credentials. It wasn’t surprising, then, that the ideas seeded were highly congruent with existing mental structures.

As raised by Mayver’s CEO (and savvy marketer herself), Bethany George, the key impetus for the change was to give the brand the flexibility to continue expanding its core range while maintaining a uniform look at shelf. Not only did the redesign create the visual block hoped for, but the revised color palette also helped more clearly distinguish individual variants. This enabled shoppers to seamlessly shift their attention to the visual anchors signposting each variant, thus making finding the right product quick and easy.

Through taking a balanced, evidence-based approach to measuring the packaging redesign’s effectiveness, it’s clear that the overhaul has primed Mayver’s for long-term success. Having crafted a distinctive and differentiated presence for many years to come, kudos must be given to the entire team involved. Importantly, it can also be chalked up as another testament to the power of ‘fresh consistency‘!

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