From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans

CHAPTER 1

Lessons from Wrap Rage

In 1978, inventor Thomas Jake Lunsford patented a new form of plastic packaging and unknowingly triggered the ire of hundreds of millions of consumers.¹

His invention was the “clamshell”—a type of packaging that envelops a product in two form-fitting, sealed plastic shells. The public frustration that Lunsford’s creation ultimately triggered was so widespread and long-lasting that an entirely new term was coined to describe it: wrap rage.

If you’re not familiar with that term, here’s how Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s founder and former CEO) defines it: “Wrap rage is the frustration we humans feel when trying to free a product from a nearly impenetrable package.”²

Surely you know the frustration and aggravation of wrap ...