When you stop and think about it, putting pictures of cockroaches on a product for people who hate them is kind of a weird strategy.

So imagine you go to the store to buy some shampoo, and you see a bottle with a picture of a model with filthy, matted hair. Or maybe you see a box of condoms that shows a thoroughly unhappy dad with a screaming baby in his arms.

Those would both seem pretty weird, right? Generally, it’s a lot nicer to show a depiction of the intended effects of goods and services, as opposed to the problem those goods and services are meant to address. So then why is it so common for bug spray packaging to be covered in pictures of the creepy crawly creatures you’re trying to banish from your home?

That oddity has apparently finally occurred to Dainihon Jochugiku, the makers of Kincho, one of Japan’s most popular bug spray brands. In February, the company quietly unveiled new packaging for its Cockroach line of anti-cockroach sprays.

At first glance, it looks like just about any other brand of insecticide, with an illustration on the label of a cockroach being zapped by the explosive azure representation of the product’s effects. But if that’s too gross for you, you’ll be happy to know that the label is now designed to be easily peeled off…

…leaving you with a simple white canister decorated with only and understated wave pattern and a modestly sized version of the Kincho logo: a rooster that’s unlikely to produce the same sort of grossed out reaction as looking at a picture of a roach.

▼ Yet another member of the Cockroach lineup, also with the easy-remove label and no cockroaches underneath

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CxpTX9xxZI

With the new packaging versions now available in stores, Japanese Twitter users who hate cockroaches, even in illustrated form, were happy to have alternatives to averting their eyes from the label whenever they needed to spray an insectoid intruder.

▼ This woman had been going so far as to use anime character masking tape to cover up the illustrated roaches on the can.

https://twitter.com/sakinzm701/status/984412470973313024

Getting back to the subject of why bug spray packaging has bugs on it in the first place, from a sales standpoint you need something to quickly communicate to shoppers what the product does, and going with just a picture of a cockroach-free home could just as easily have people thinking it’s a cleaning spray, or kaiju repellant. Once shoppers have already made the decision to buy your product, though, you can probably back off on that a little. This is yet another example of successful Japanese companies’ customer-oriented way of thinking, and we applaud Dainihon Jochugiku for giving the squeamish an effective option that won’t require them to blow up their toilets or resort to mystical countermeasures in their battles against cockroaches.

Source: Twitter/@nana10n via Hachima Kiko
Images: YouTube/KINCHO 公式チャンネル