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by aresant 3703 days ago
In a past life I founded/operated a conversion rate optimization company.

One of our all time most successful tests was related to this story and happened almost by accident.

The client had just rolled out new packaging and wanted help validating the change statistically, very similar to this situation.

Their metric was measuring upsells to a premium product after a purchase, and like Candy Japan, found statistically insignificant results.

But the new packaging was beautiful and we wanted to test it on their landing page.

We tried just replacing the old product image on landing page. Meh results, no real bump.

We tried increasing the size of the image + circling with "Improved" (no joke). 10% bump. Interesting.

We hired a professional model to hold the product and smile. 15% bump. !?

We hired a group of professional models to hold the product and smile. 40% bump in sales. !@%K$!?

We re-hired the same group of people to hold product, look SUPER excited (jumping up and down like their team just won the superbowl). 50%+ bump in sales.

No joke.

If Candy Japan is reading and you'd like some help recreating I would not be shocked to see something similarly group oriented, visceral, and beautiful bump yeh.

4 comments

I wonder if you could have gotten a similar result from the same models holding the old box?
this is the million dollar question
Alternatively, what if you already had the models and wanted to improve?
Interesting story! I've long wondered if the (over)excited voice of many a startup's marketing/onboarding/help copy is justified by customers liking it more than the alternatives. This seems connected.

>10% bump.

>15% bump.

>40% bump in sales.

>50%+ bump in sales.

Was that cumulative (i.e., 1.1 * 1.15 * 1.4 * 1.5 ≈ 2.7 total) or relative to the base figure?

Advertising is important to set a level of trust in the product

How many sales would Amazon have today if they went back to their 2000s website look?

The decorated box might not even have the best drawing, but indicates that the salespeople went the extra mile

Hmm, let's see. Beautiful Japanese woman(en) in form fitting outfits holding product, smiling. 940% bump I'd bet.