As a manufacturer, the first thing your potential customers see is your branding. This might be online on your social media pages, or it might be browsing the shelves of their local supermarket. Making an impression and having your product packaging stand out can be the difference between a consumer picking up or passing over your product. Product packaging is incredibly important, so let’s look at how we can improve it.
Go For Simplicity
Complex, fancy packaging might appeal to the designer in you, but the busier the package design is and the more difficult to identify what the product is, the less effective your packaging will be. Simple and minimalist packaging means that it should be on-brand and it should reflect what is inside the packaging at a glance. Avoid busy patterns and too many words that force you to use tiny type, particularly on the front of the packaging. The golden rule of simple package design is that you want your consumers to easily identify what it is and who makes it.
Keep It Consistent
You’ll want to make sure that your primary design elements like colors, logos, and fonts carry across to all your branding. This might include posters and flyers and even your online presence on social media and your website. This consistency will make your product easier to spot on a supermarket shelf and more recognizable between media and platforms. It’s a good idea to review not only the design of the product packaging, labels, and other media, but the messaging in the copy too. Your product is more than just a label in the interconnected world. Your product is a message, a brand, a social responsiveness message, and it should invoke emotional attachment. Use this to your advantage in your packaging and marketing.
Add a Sticker
If you’re looking for a way to make a product package pop, or you want to promote something specific about it, adding a sticker to the packaging is a quick and easy way to do this. Promotions around seasonal holidays are particularly effective and avoid you having to manufacture products with seasonal branding on the packaging that might look aged and dated once the holiday has passed. Best of all, using a sticker maker online makes this idea effortless.
Plan for Product Extensions
If you’re making a product that could eventually end up having variations, then you’ll want to make sure your branding can be extended to accommodate this. As an example, if you manufacture ketchup, and you decide to diversify to barbecue sauce, you want to keep your branding consistent and that means changing only specific elements of your product packaging and, as we mentioned earlier, keeping the overall look and feel consistent.
Make Sure It’s Practical
So many manufacturers get this basic product packaging rule wrong. While it might look really fancy to package your product in an abnormal packaging design, and it might work to get people to look at your product, once they’ve purchased it and brought it home, this choice might not be such a good one. For example, juice or drink in a fancy-shaped packaging might look great but in practical use, it might make it difficult to pour without messing, and it’ll take up more space than it needs to in the refrigerator. It’s a good idea to stick to practical packaging and make choices for this practicality over trying to make an impact.
There you have it. Five ways that, without much effort and with some clever use of packaging, will give your product the best chance of success in the market.