Alex Hunt and Matt Salem Turned Decades of Shelf Data Into unPACKED, a Playbook for Packaging That Sells
“Our fundamental thesis, that packaging has huge power to drive sales and the components of packaging that really drive effectiveness, they haven’t changed at all.”
Alex Hunt, co-author of unPACKED
Alex Hunt is CEO of Behaviorally and Matt Salem is an SVP there. Behaviorally works with all 20 of the world’s 20 largest consumer packaged goods companies by sales, studying what happens in the split second a shopper faces the shelf. Together they wrote unPACKED: Predict Packaging That Sells with Scribe Media, then came back a year later for a second edition.
Be seen first
Clip · Matt Salem on why you have to be seen · 14s
The book’s core is the 4S framework: a pack has to be seen, shoppable, seductive, and selected. Matt’s point is that the first S unlocks the rest.
“What we’ve seen over time is that first and foremost, you have to be seen. So it’s not surprising in some ways that being seen more leads to being bought more, because if you’re not seen, you never even enter the shopper’s consideration set.”
— Matt Salem
One study in the book tested more than 300 chocolate bars with over 3,000 shoppers. The packs that stood out most were over 2.5 times likelier to be bought. Alex says the framework holds far beyond chocolate.
“And these are four drivers of packaging success that we’ve seen work across all of those consumers and all of those different brands that we’ve been lucky enough to partner with.”
— Alex Hunt
Why you can’t just ask shoppers
Clip · Alex Hunt on unreliable witnesses · 32s
Most packaging research asks people what they would buy. Alex argues that answer is close to useless.
“People are really, really unreliable witnesses to their own behavior.”
— Alex Hunt
“The truth is that it’s a split second in a store and literally exposed to thousands of brands, thousands of products every minute.”
— Alex Hunt
So Behaviorally puts the design on a real shelf and watches: where shoppers’ eyes go, what they pick up, how long they hold it, and whether it goes in the basket.
When the data is there and the room misses it
Clip · Matt Salem on the core buyers a redesign lost · 37s
Before the first edition, the authors interviewed dozens of clients, and their stories run through the book as four composite characters. Matt’s most memorable one is a cold and cough medicine redesign. The cleaner, more modern pack tested well, then lost the brand’s older, loyal buyers once it hit shelves. The warning had been in the report.
“It might’ve only been two or three pages out of 20, but I think it’s not about the number of pages. It’s about who they are.”
— Matt Salem
The lesson he took is to agree up front on which measures decide success, so the whole team reads the results the same way.
Five percent is a boardroom number
Clip · Alex Hunt on the five percent swing · 18s
Packaging can swing sales about five percent in either direction. Alex explains why that matters more than it sounds.
“Five percent, first of all, it feels small. But when you put it into the context of all of the different cans of soda or bars of chocolate or packs of chips that a company, a large CPG company sells, it’s a tremendous amount.”
— Alex Hunt
Why a second edition one year later
Clip · Matt Salem on packaging when AI shops · 38s
The first edition came out in 2025 with 10 chapters. The second edition has 12, because the way people shop changed fast.
“We’re at a seminal moment, both in the change in the shopper landscape as AI and agentic shopping really takes hold.”
— Alex Hunt
The new chapters look at shoppers who use AI assistants and agents to research and buy. The finding Matt keeps coming back to is that packaging does not go away.
“What we found as we put together the chapters is that roughly three in four shoppers will tell you that packaging is still critical in terms of their shopping experience, even when it’s A.I. assisted.”
— Matt Salem
Keeping decades of method out of the jargon
Clip · Alex Hunt on boiling data down to what matters · 41s
Behaviorally’s work runs on billions of data points. Turning that into a book a non-marketer can follow was the hard part.
“And so part of our task day to day as well as writing the book was to boil what is a complex subject down into just what really matters.”
— Alex Hunt
Asked how they found Scribe, Alex’s answer was simple.
“Well, we had some fantastic recommendations from other authors.”
— Alex Hunt
A playbook bigger than packaging
Clip · Matt Salem on a playbook beyond packaging · 38s
The authors see the book as a model for any part of the marketing mix, from pricing to product innovation to communications.
“I think essentially what we tried to do is put together a playbook exemplified by packaging, but the playbook itself is transferable to other areas of the marketing mix.”
— Matt Salem
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