Just like books are often judged by their covers, products are frequently judged by their packaging before a buyer gets to experience the item. When buying decisions are so heavily dependent on a package’s power to influence shopping behavior, it’s crucial to maximize a packaging design’s potential and optimize every aspect of it. After all, packaging is fundamental in helping you increase sales.
Here are three factors to ensure your packaging design drives purchases:
Attractiveness
Because packaging must first engage customers visually, this is one of the most important aspects to consider before adjusting your current packaging strategy or launching a new design. A high-quality packaging design draws the eye to the shelf from a distance.
Depending on your target audience, you can incorporate different packaging effects to stand out from the crowd. For example, cosmetics packaging can utilize bright colors to grab attention. Some brands can use decorative elements such as foils and embossing to create visual appeal. All these effects can be combined in a multitude of ways to come up with a highly attractive packaging design for your brand.
Uniqueness
Similar to visual attractiveness, packaging must offer something unique to truly appeal to customers, although uniqueness can manifest itself in several different ways. Packaging designs need to capture attention from the shelf, but once they draw customers in, your product needs to hold their interest.
In addition to presenting customers with a packaging design that is visually attractive, it needs to stand out from the rest. Unique structures work to capture attention, especially when competitors utilize standard square boxes. Changing the size of the overall package can also have the same effect.
Beyond structural changes, press effects and texture changes add something unique that customers will want to interact with. Soft-touch coatings, specialty substrates, embossing, or debossing help accomplish this goal.
Effectiveness
Although visual appeal and uniqueness are crucial elements of a successful packaging design, it’s also crucial that your strategy has a high level of functionality and effectiveness. How well does your design, be it a structural folding carton or a rigid set-up box, communicate your brand message and unique value proposition? How does your design fit into a retail environment? If your packaging design doesn’t stand out on the shelves or is not conducive to being used in a variety of store merchandising displays, it may lead to lower-than-anticipated sales. Details related to shipping and pack-out should also be considered during the design stage.
A truly effective packaging design is more than visuals. An effective design is one that works well with your manufacturing and distribution systems and drives sales at the store. Effective packaging is also something every brand manager, marketing manager, packaging engineer and packaging procurement manager is concerned with.
Striking the right balance between attractiveness, uniqueness, and effectiveness is a challenge even for the most experienced brands. Partnering with an industry-leading packaging supplier can help you press the limits of what’s possible with your new packaging design.
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