Marc Haine explains how the iPhone's unboxing experience—the layered white box, premium cardboard, the ritual of opening it—triggers an emotional connection that makes customers feel the purchase matters. When brands create this sense of belonging, customers become advocates who spread the story.
This is the way that you open the door to your customers' hearts. These are brands that really have outshined their competition and really showed this idea that they are on fire for their customers, for their customers' experience. Open up a box from a new iPhone and just that experience of getting that white box and pulling off the white box and everything is done in layers. How cool is that? What an experience that is. And so, every time you open up an iPhone box, it's like Christmas time. And you just kind of just judge by the box, the quality of the cardboard that they're using and so on that this purchase means something. But bigger than that, brands need to create a sense of relatedness. They create a sense of connectedness to the brand So, when we go out there, we are actually creating a sense of the community. We are helping people connect with our brand that they are able to then turn around and tell everybody else about because it feels like, I belong here.
