Why Change

Perhaps you know that I drink tea. Lots of tea. Between 10 and 20 cups of tea each day (actually that’s really 4-9 mugs of tea, but it takes 10 to 20 cups of water).

So it’s safe to say I’m fairly familiar with the packaging for Twinings English Breakfast Tea. But just the other day I noticed that Twinings had changed the wrapper for the tea bags. What sort of thinking motivates changes like this?

Now you may be thinking that Twinings is attempting to lure the hip-hop teenager crowd into dens of tea-drinking iniquity by embracing a more edgy packaging, but the general branding has stayed exactly the same. Twinings just made the wrapper for the tea bags feel chimpier.

The tag that hangs out of the pot is smaller. The paper wrapper feels more like plastic and the comfortable flap is gone — replaced with a squared-off fold of paper.

Just not a satisfying change.