Reading: Packaging
Creating the Perfect Package
Product packaging is an underappreciated hero in the marketing world. Packaging is supremely functional: it protects the product. It contains the product. It displays the product. It promotes the product. It’s design and labeling communicate about the product. And the package itself can even increase the product’s utility, making it better suited to however the customer wants to use it.
If packaging does all these things, why is it undervalued? As a marketing tool, packaging often feels low-tech and old-school in the information age. It’s just not as sexy as Web sites, events, or social media—and yet, it remains a staple of the purchasing environment.
With the increased emphasis on self-service marketing at supermarkets, drugstores, and even department stores, the role of packaging is significant. For example, in a typical supermarket a shopper passes about six hundred items per minute—or one item every tenth of a second. Thus, the only way to get some consumers to notice a product is by in-store displays, shelf hangers, tear-off coupon blocks, other point-of-purchase devices, or, last but not least, effective packages.[1]
Packaging provides an opportunity for a product to jump out and differentiate itself on the crowded, viciously competitive shelves of supermarkets, drugstores, department stores, and other retailers.
The Roles Packaging Can Play
Marketers invest a great deal in motivational research, color testing, psychological manipulation, and so on in order to learn how the majority of consumers will react to a new package. Based on the results of this research, past experience, and the current and anticipated decisions of competitors, marketers determine what primary role the package will play relative to the product. They determine which of the following needs to be included:
- Quality Example: Lush Handmade Cosmetics won awards for their recyclable gift box for Lush demonstrating true packaging engineering by morphing into new shapes as it’s folded and refolded to reveal a range of 8 products to the consumer. Once products are removed it becomes a unique keepsake box. Unique and innovative, it was a sell-out in many countries. Taking inspiration from a Rubik’s cube, the secret to its design lies in four pairs of interlocking compartments, each with a unique one-way locking tab. When interlocked in a specific order they create a never-ending, free-flowing design that, even when filled with products, holds its shape.
- Safety
Example: Product protection and child-proofing are standard features in the packaging of Tylenol, Benadryl, Children’s Motrin, and other over-the-counter drugs. - Instruction
Example: Dosage information for drugs and “how to use this product” information for a variety of appliances, devices, and other products helps ensure that consumers use products responsibly and as intended. - Legal compliance
Example: Health Canada, Canadian Competition Bureau and the Canadian Food