Packaging means how your brand is represented on shelves or to customers when they receive your product in the mail. Nowadays packaging design has become a product on its own. It captures our attention, reassures us, and makes itself useful and its visual elements appeal to consumers.
Your packaging design might be the most important form of marketing you have because it is the only form of marketing that 100% of your customers will see.
Important points to keep in mind while Packaging Design
Audience:
Your brand message has to be about more than the benefits of your products – you have to relate those benefits to what your audience cares about.
Who are they? What questions do they have? What pain points do they need solutions for? Packaging needs to feel personal, fit a lifestyle, and inspire the consumer.
Goals and Objectives:
Consider your business goals, why you are communicating with your audience, and what you want your audience to do.
Your marketing goals should drive your packaging communication. This includes how you want customers to perceive your brand and actions you want them to take after they purchase your product.
Tactical Plan
Think about all the elements of packaging that you can use to communicate your brand message:
- Logos
- Graphics and imagery
- Copy
- Fonts
- Shape and design of the package
- Packaging materials
- Sustainability certifications
Measure
You’ll need to measure how effective and visible your communication is. Are your customers taking the actions you want them to?
Has your Packaging Design improved your brand sentiment? Are you selling more of the products that have new Packaging Design?
But how will you know if you’ve succeeded or failed? What will you measure?
You could also release slight variations in packaging and measure the success of each to continue to optimize your packaging brand communications strategy.
Top packaging designs always consider the consumer’s role in the unveiling of a product. A great unboxing is like a piece of theatre – to really wow your customers, you need to create an engaging ritual upon opening.
Think tissue paper for a touch of luxury, attractive packaging inserts, or a custom box – all of this adds anticipation and excitement to the purchase!
Below, is a list of all the ‘ingredients’ needed to answer these two questions:
- Category or product type
- Brand
- Variant: for products which offer more than one option
- Functional benefit(s): what the product does
- Reason(s)-to believe: why the consumer should find the claimed functional benefit credible
- Emotional end-promise or benefit: how the functional benefit fulfills a higher need
- Call-to-action: why the consumer should buy it now
- Size, weight, content details, etc.: practical information the consumer needs to know
Designs that feature more of these ingredients tend to perform better.
The minimalist design approach is that the more elements you leave out, the less likely consumers are to ‘get it’.
Minimalism is thriving in many areas of design in 2020. For example, we’re seeing strong examples of minimalism in 2020 logo design trends.
Whether it’s a website, a living room, a dress, or packaging – minimalist design allows you to draw focus to the elements that really matter.
You wouldn’t show off an engagement ring in a pile of gaudy costume jewelry. And, your product won’t show off to its best advantage inside busy, visually overwhelming packaging design.
Designers have wised up to this. And so we find this minimalism boom time continuing from the last few years.
Designs featuring restraint and simplicity are particularly popular among natural products. Perhaps because an uncluttered design communicates that there’s no need to hide behind busy graphics.
You can see this trend in action in Target’s newly released Good & Gather brand.
The brand’s packaging eschews busy, hyper graphics for richly-colored plain backgrounds, warm serif fonts, and enlarged food photography. Even the designs for their children’s line uses flat illustrations (more on that below) rather than more elaborate graphics.
Happy Customer
Happy You”
