While most people will say not to judge a book by its cover, the truth is that studies have shown just how judgmental we are about how things look. Product packaging is one such instance where the things that we look at and pay for often depend on how we feel when we set our eyes on them. If you’re wondering whether your packaging is important, it turns out it’s almost as important as the product itself.
Here are five reasons why you should consider the importance of your packaging.
1. Expand Your Brand
Having a strong brand is essential to getting your customers and clients to remember and recognize you from across the store. The more often they see your packaging, the better they’ll perceive your brand. When you take the time to put your best branding foot forward, you solidify what you’re about in the minds of your customers.
Great packaging allows you to create a recognizable brand message that customers will remember. Having a cohesive brand requires that you create strong packaging that continues the branding journey from ad to product.
If you have a distinctive brand color, having that color and your font visible to your customers and clients from far away will create myopia. They might not even see the other brands that you sit next to when they’re focused on your brand. The best way to get people to forget about other brands is to help them to think of yours whenever they’re going shopping for your products and services.
Time and again, customers have a higher degree of trust for brands that they’ve seen before and had at least one experience with. It’s much harder for a brand that is completely brand new to stand out to customers. If they’ve had at least one interactions with your brand, you can rest assured that they’ll choose your package over other unrecognizable ones.
2. Open Yourself Up To Unboxing
One of the most surprising new phenomena in the world of branding, social media sharing, and internet media consumption is the unboxing videos.
When a consumer or YouTube user make an unboxing video, they get the chance to show off your packaging and start the customer journey from the outside. The customer journey is a complicated dance that starts from the moment they set their eyes on your product. If they’re immediately drawn in and curious what you make, they could be converted, even as new customers.
Unboxing is especially popular with kids and products geared toward teenage users and younger. If you’ve never seen an unboxing video, look for those in your industry and see what they have to offer. You might find that people are looking at something different than you imagined when they set their eyes on products like yours for the first time.
High-quality packaging, like what apple makes for their products, has a higher premium and can drive sales based on the excitement of opening it up alone.
3. Express the Quality
High-quality products and services need to make themselves aware to a potential customer from before they even purchase the product. The point of sale will be long after the moment they decide they want to buy your products. They need to be convinced of quality long before they consider a purchase.
High-quality products will start off with high-quality packaging. Customers assume that the packaging quality will express the quality of what is underneath.
Most companies spend a lot of time considering how users act and think when they first handle your products and packaging. The weight, the texture, and even the shape of a package are important to a customer’s sales journey.
You need to be convincing customers to buy your products from the moment they set their eyes on your products. When they can imagine themselves using or owning those products, you’ve succeeded in your journey.
4. Packaging Can Be Practical
While there are elements to packaging that are driven by a customer’s desire to own your products, there are other practical concerns as well. Packaging is meant to protect your products and serves to deliver products to customers safely and easily.
When you’re packing valuable products or anything that’s fragile, you need to take extra steps to address safety concerns for your customers to feel comfortable. When shipping an iPhone, for example, it not only comes in a sturdy package, but it also is shaped in a way that makes it easy to ship. The strong cardboard and reinforced edges ensure that a dropped phone is secure and can ship easily.
The simple rectangular shape ensures that they can be stacked into boxes and shipped easily. When care is put into the packaging, customers will notice. They’ll even be easy for factory workers and distributors to pack into a box.
5. Be a Household Name
When you make packaging that becomes recognizable, using a unique font and color scheme, you’re making yourself a household name without realizing it. If enough people come to know your brand and what your packaging looks like, they won’t even read the packaging anymore.
Your brand and the look of it will become an image, rather than a font.
When people buy a bottle of Heinz ketchup, for instance, they know what the bottle should look and feel like. Packaging in many instances will overshadow the product itself in recognizability. To learn more about becoming a household name, look into what other brands are doing to stand out.
Product Packaging is Important to Customers
While you might not think product packaging can affect how people feel about your products and services, you’re dead wrong. Packaging holds the key to understanding what your customers look for and want to feel about products like yours.
If you’re reconsidering your whole brand image, check out our guide to business cards.