Call Us Email Us

How Packaging Design can Make or Break your Brand – Part 3

Plain package

How Packaging Design can Make or Break your Brand – Part 3 by Persona Design

 

“Embrace Green

With more customers increasingly conscious of environmental issues, investing in eco-friendly, sustainable packaging design is a smart move, not to mention helping improve your brand’s carbon footprint. Whether the packaging is limited to reduce the amount of waste, or made from recycled, biodegradable or reusable materials, going green with your packaging can make your products more attractive and premium to customers. Sustainability is an increasingly important issue to consumers and ‘responsible’ and ‘caring’ brands are seen to be more desirable.

Design for Durability

Depending on the supply chain process and the shelf life of your products, your packaging may require extended durability. Long-lasting packaging is especially important for slower moving, high- value consumer good but FMCG products will also require a high degrees of durability. The average retail store, particularly supermarkets and discounters are demanding environments, requiring robust packaging. Damaged packaging at the point of sale or post-sale can have a very negative effect on your brand, as customers will view it as ‘cheap’ or substandard quality.

Production and Manufacturing Constraints

It’s important to consider production line requirements: how your product will fill the packaging. Is it hand packed are on an automated production line? What are the specific packing needs of both those environments?

When designing a pack, it’s also really important to take into account the final appearance of the product inside the package, to ensure an attractive overall presentation. Make sure that packaging is not too loose or too tight, and that displays the product in an appealing way and that the colours and textures etc of the actual product are enhanced through the design of your packaging.

If something tastes incredible but visually doesn’t look too appealing, then maybe you should not make it visible within your packaging design. On the other hand, is yours is the kind of product that visually sells very well, particularly when enhanced with great packaging, like a lot of bakery goods or confectionery, or consumers really need to see it to make their purchasing decision, such as certain perishables like meat, fish and vegetables, then you need to take this into account within your packaging design. If consumers need to see what’s inside and you don’t provide a way for them to view the contents, they will open and pull you packaging apart to take a look, meaning that you will end up with a lot of damaged goods and returns.

Choose an Unusual Shape

Package design with an unusual shape can be a very challenging process, but very worthwhile for the right idea. A uniquely shaped package truly stands out on retail shelves and can become a trademark protectable and uniquely valuable asset of your brand. Other important design choices here include display considerations, such as allowing the package to stand or stack on shelves appropriately too. It also can’t be too tall to fit on the average retail shelf of the relevant store your product sells in, like a supermarket, hardware or children’s toy store. Make sure you know the maximum shelf height of all your retailers and then ensure your pack is slightly under that for a sure fit.

Gloji uses a unique package design to fantastic effect with its light bulb-shaped juice bottles, which are meant to represent the healthy properties of the beverage that ‘light you up’ from the inside. It makes the brand very memorable and distinctive, when compared to its competitors.”

This 4 part guide was written by Lorraine Carter of Persona Design www.personadesign.ie

Search Posts

Categories