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Many companies continuously struggle with marketing and branding initiatives, all the while overlooking one key to emerging sales and solving marketing issues—packaging design.
At its core, packaging design is all about establishing a visual connection with your customer by using color, imagery, texture, and form that is both captivating to the eye and efficient at building brand loyalty.
Having consulted and printed branding collaterals for thousands of US businesses for over a decade, we can say for certain that taking a strategic approach to how a product is presented is invaluable in creating long-lasting brand equity. Packaging design is also about using tech-integrated methods to provide product, manufacture, and regulatory information to ensure customers appreciate and are empowered to make the right choices during pre-production, production, and post-production.
You might be wondering how packaging design helps improve sales, facilitate customer satisfaction, enable customer retention, and help improve your brand image. Take a look at leading companies such as Chobani, Oxford Pennant, and Coca-Cola. These companies use ad creatives to not only improve sales, but they have realized the importance of packaging design in creating a personal relationship with customers and enabling product transparency.
These examples indicate the benefits of packaging design in facilitating a good Return on Investment (ROI). No matter the company, whether a start-up looking at market entry, an established company yet to fully integrate branding perspectives, or a designer looking for that clear-cut packaging design, we identify facestocks, coatings, and create customized shapes and formats for all packaging design needs. Improving your organization’s Return on Investments (ROI) cannot do without a solid, powerful branding foundation piece—your primary packaging presentation.
The Silent Salesperson
In terms of enduring ROI, packaging design is far more valuable than the containers used for packaging. The design used on the package can be the difference between product category dominance or outright dismissal and bankruptcy.
Packaging design is the silent salesperson who focuses on brand value, sales growth, and the customer’s emotions. Customers are emotionally connected to colors, fonts, and imagery. Getting this right means creating a lasting, emotional connection with customers. This creates a ripple effect, increasing the perceived value of your products, enhancing the positive association with your brand, improving the way customers interact with your business, and fueling better brand recognition and repeat sales.
Packaging Design that Attracts Customers
There is a reason why companies such as Coca-Cola and Cadbury are easily identifiable to the eye. Beyond color psychology, these brands’ have fortified efforts at creating a unique brand image and experience that is deeply rooted in their identity.
Designing for visual impact is a priority at a time in which so much noise and competition are present. Consider the different ways and situations wherein your customers meet your brand and product. For on-shelf appeal, using die-cut custom labels instead of simple shape labels is a great differentiating aspect in setting your brand apart from competitors, and making your packaging markedly unique for customers. QR Codes are also small yet dynamic additions to reshape your customers’ shopping habits and create new avenues of both learning and upselling.
Brand Positioning
Pasta is a common product on many households’ kitchen shelves. Nothing was more novel than Explore Cuisine’s introduction of black-colored Pasta. Yes, not the normal cream-colored pasta packaged in familiar sachets, but black pasta in black packs. While some customers can easily refer to this new product and packaging as odd, Explore Cuisine positioned this new brand of spaghetti in a creative way to attract new customers and to target clients ready to explore a new food cuisine.
This brand positioning approach heavily relied on a new packaging design approach to uniquely position and reshape both product and market. When planning to make big changes with your product and packaging, always aim to stay true to your brand’s values, while at the same time creating appeal towards a new product, bolstering this with a new packaging format or design.
Express your Brand’s Asset
Marketing and aggressive advertising have been the cornerstone of companies looking to increase their ROI. But the use of packaging designs exceeds up to three advertising campaigns. One thing is for sure, advertisement campaign budgets exceed packaging design budgets. The trick is not to focus on budgets but on the ability of both aspects to reinforce your brand. Where you are spending money on advertisements, look to primarily invest in strategic packaging design to attract more customers and create a loyal fan base. Choose wisely, save your money, and experience revenue growth!
Reduced Operational Costs
In the same vein that packaging design budgets are cost cautious, packaging designs and associated styles help reduce time and advertisement costs. The trick, however, lies in using materials that will enhance efficiency while reducing waste in the long term.
As your company spends more money running marketing campaigns, it is important to use packaging design materials and activities that will help shield the company from having to invest more in promotional activities. Having the right materials and designs will also help eliminate or reduce engineering costs, fees charged by design companies, and costs associated with packaging scales.
Packaging Design is a Long-term Investment
You might be wondering why you have to improve the design of branded packaging when you have social media platforms where you can freely place the products and get ‘likes’.
Remember, the aim is not to showcase design skill; rather, the focus is to instill strategic, consistent packaging design that becomes the workhorse of your company’s branding and marketing efforts. Quality and authenticity in packaging design are critical, and although this might lead to a higher hard or soft return, the aim is ROI and this is worth the gamble!
Contact us for a free consultation to help re-energize your brand with cost-effective packaging that works as hard as you do.
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