Look for compensating behaviors in your product users. That’s an axiom for good package design that’s making a buzz in marketing circles.

Heinz’s new Fridge Door Fit ketchup bottle grew out of this approach. Plenty of other untapped opportunities also await. Success may require examining not only compensating behaviors but also the cost of doing nothing.

Consider motor oil. Every vehicle owner changes their oil regularly. Motorists fall into one of two camps on oil regularly. Motorists fall into one of two camps on oil changes: Some are do-it-yourselfers while the rest of us patronize the neighborhood quick-lube garage.

Ronald deVlam has a great idea for a motor oil package for the D-I-Y crowd: a dual-chamber container. One chamber holds new oil and the other is a receptacle for used oil drained from the vehicle.

The extra chamber serves two purposes. First, it eliminates the inconvenience of emptying used oil into a separate container and taking it to a recycling center. Or worse, dumping it in the trash or into the soil. Second, consider a motor oil brand that doesn’t enjoy much distribution through oil-change shops. A value-added retail package may convert some consumers who patronize oil-change garages into D-I-Yers and loyalists of the forward-thinking brand.

The dual-chamber container would include room for a postage-paid label to ship the spent oil to a recycler. This same recycling approach has created a legion of brand loyalists for Hewlett-Packard printer cartridges.

Opportunities to win new customers abound when you look at the consumer as both a shopper and a product user.

- Jim George, Editor in Chief