Marketing writes checks that operations can't cash.

This week I bought a twelve-pack of Coke Zero. One corner of the top has a perforated tab. The idea is that you pull the tab, it opens cleanly, and from that point forward the box is the dispenser. One can at a time. Convenient. Tidy.

I carefully pulled on the perforated area, using the tab, exactly as intended. Eight cans rolled out of the bottom of the fridge onto the floor. Shaken and stirred.

On my counter there's a box of Starbucks K-Cups. It's a retail box, designed to sell from the shelf like any other. But Starbucks designed this one to keep working after checkout, as a display box. Branded, finished, the kind of thing you'd be okay leaving out on the counter. The branding is two-fold: shelf and in-home. Which is smart. If the box lives on the counter, the brand lives on the counter. Every morning, reaching for a pod, you see the Starbucks name. Smart, really.

There's a perforated tab on the box designed to create a clean dispensing opening. Without it, the box doesn't function as a display. It's just a damaged box sitting on your counter. The perforation doesn't work. What you get instead is a tear that goes sideways, or stops halfway, or pulls more cardboard than it was supposed to. What's being seen every morning is a torn up box reminding you of your failure as a box opener. Even when it's not your fault.

And here's the part Starbucks should really think about. That partially destroyed box doesn't read as your failure for long. It reads as theirs. Every single morning, coffee in hand, you're looking at a small monument to a packaging failure with a Starbucks logo on it. The box was designed to deliver a daily brand impression. Mission accomplished. Just not the impression anyone in Seattle had in mind. They designed it to be seen. This is what's being seen.

Then this morning, a paper towel tore sideways instead of along the perforation and took half the next sheet with it. Three products. One week. Same failure.

I know enough about packaging manufacturing to know what causes this. There's a perforation knife that scores the material before assembly. Sharp knife, clean perforation, tab tears the way it was designed to tear. Dull knife, inconsistent score, and the customer gets cans on the floor and a gaping cardboard maw where a clean product dispensing opening was supposed to be. Someone just needs to go around and sharpen the blades. That's the whole fix. It's not complicated. And I mean that literally. The industry even has a spec for this. Perforating rules are ordered by teeth per inch and exact cut-to-tie ratios, and the equipment manufacturers publish maintenance guides on keeping them sharp. The knowledge exists. It's documented. The sharpening doesn't happen anyway.

The fact that it hasn't happened is the story. Nobody in these organizations has a job that requires them to care about the perforation knife in relation to the brand promise. The person responsible for equipment maintenance is measured on uptime and throughput. The person responsible for the brand is measured on awareness and sentiment. The knife sits exactly in the gap between those two jobs, dull and unsharpened, because sharpening it belongs to nobody. Marketing writes the check. Operations can't cash it. When those two functions share no accountability for what happens in between, the check bounces. The customer holds it.

I eventually bought a black wire rack that holds forty K-Cups. Eighteen dollars. No logo. Works perfectly. The Starbucks box went in the recycling where it belongs. Starbucks lost the counter.

— Gary Hopkins

Founder and principal of Method, a strategic marketing practice.