As we have mentioned before in many of our previous blog posts, retail packaging is an important element of a company’s branding. It is a messaging avenue. For some consumers it might be the first point of contact with a company or brand. For others it might be their message of preference. All in all, retail packaging allows marketers to send messages about a brand through graphics, words, or materials, persuading audiences to choose a product, or creating loyalty due to preference.
As the name states it, retail packaging is how you present your product in retail stores. It is a form of advertising a product, because audiences are being exposed to it the same way they might be exposed to a message through a billboard or magazine ad. The idea here is to use whatever form of packaging material you are using as a canvas for packaging design. The goal, and challenge, is to persuade the consumer to choose your product over your competitor’s who sits right beside you in the shelf. This is why understanding your customer is so important in any sort of business. If you know who your consumer is and what their preferences tend to be, you can use retail packaging as a persuasive avenue. This involves, graphics, colours, wording and typography.
We have written a few blog posts on eCommerce and packaging before, where we give tips on how to improve eCommerce packaging, and explain The Importance of Packaging in eCommerce. What these blog posts have in common is that there is always room to get messages to the consumer through the way the products get to them, in the mail. One of the most successful strategies in direct marketing is personalization. Adding the consumer’s name adds a great deal of value to them. In eCommerce, one of the way this is possible is to send a personalized note thanking the consumer for the purchase and encouraging them to repeat with an incentive.
Furthermore, the reason why we include eCommerce and compare it to retail packaging, is because it is a great idea to take advantage of printing capabilities, and brand a products shipping box, whether it is a mailer box, or a custom box.
Here is where a company builds trust with its customers. When we say packaging transparency we mean that in the packaging itself, there is literature that explains truthfully what the product is and what it contains. A good example is the food industry. There are a lot of regulations for food packaging where things such as nutritional facts, and ingredients must be printed in the packaging. Nowadays, there are a lot of dietary preferences, and allergies that people have. So if you want to advertise that a product is gluten free, or nut free, it better be truthful information. Both for legal issues and trust issues. If a consumer trusts what what your the message you are sending, it may encourage repeat purchase.
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