How Design can Make or Break your Brand Part 4

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Packaging Design Guide by Persona Design – Part 4

In this 4 part series, we reproduce the fourth part of this excellent guide (written by Lorraine Carter of Persona Design) to understanding how your packaging’s design can help or hinder your brand

Think beyond the shelf

Your package design should continue to work effectively, even after purchase. A package that’s too difficult to open will turn off customers, making them less likely to make a repeat purchase or stay loyal to your brand. Another consideration is product use. If all of the product won’t be used in immediately, you’ll need a way for customers to reclose the package and store unused content or portions. It also need to look attractive in the home are out of the retail environment so it continues to sell itself and reaffirm important, asset building brand values.

Special materials

Giving your package design a luxurious detail or two can help your brand stand out. Consider invoking the customer’s sense of touch through materials like velvet, wood veneer or higher quality paper. Details with embossing, wax seals, hot foil stamping and letterpress seals can also add a premium touch to your pack design.

The Personal Touch

Handmade, hand crafted or otherwise personal details can deliver a stand-out appearance to you brand packaging. Details that appear handwritten, hand-crafted, hand-tied, or individually applied can add to a really premium sense of personalisation for your products. You can even create an overall handmade look for your products with the creative use of production techniques.

Focus on Shelf Impact

Shelf impact is a retail term that describes the way a product actually looks on store shelves, whether it blends in or stands out. Even the most unique and distinctive package designs may not be effective if they don’t have shelf impact. This is a really important aspect of your packaging designs to test before launching a new product or package redesign.

Physically arrange your products on shelves, next to competitor’s items in the same product category, just as they would appear in stores. The more distinctive your product appears from their surrounding items, they better it will sell. Achieving shelf impact can take some experimentation but its critically important and worth all the effort. In you may be surprised to find that overly elaborate designs tend to vanish or blend in on shelves, while less cluttered designs ‘pop’ and stand out in amongst the visual barrage.

Consumers are overloaded which information from the moment they wake: successful brands simplify things for them, remove problems, enhance people’s lives and make the decision-making process easier. You need to ensure your brand exceeds on all those fronts to be more successful.

Effective package design that reflects your brand story and conveys your brand promise and values can help you strengthen your brand, increase customer loyalty and grow your bottom line. You should place as much emphasis and care on packaging design as you do on your products themselves to ensure a consistent and memorable brand experience for your customers and most importantly so you can increase your profitability.

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