Brand Building on the Doorstep: The Importance of the First (Physical) Impression

Many brands spend considerable resources to optimize the consumer’s online path to purchase only to have their products arrive unceremoniously on the consumer’s doorstep a few days later in a battered cardboard box. In this article, I argue that many firms are foregoing an opportunity to both strengthen their brand and decrease return rates when they ignore the potential of a product’s delivery package to create a brand-building experience. Why are investments in doorstep branding effective and which firms stand to benefit the most from them? The goal of this article is to raise these questions, offer a framework to address them, and provide preliminary evidence in a proof-of-concept study demonstrating that branding experiences can travel directly to the consumer’s front door.