Packaging can be one of your most important marketing tools. It provides a tangible impression of your brand and acts as a silent sales person in-store. You can have mediocre packaging but what if your packaging fails all together. Here are some ways to avoid the epic failure.
1) Seek input from potential retailers
If you don't solicit input from potential partners, you run the risk of producing a package that can't be merchandised in their store. Let's say your box only stacks but in their store it is pegged. Do your leg work and see how your package is merchandised before you start the package design process. Meet with the buyer and see what they suggest regarding package format, wording and content. Show them a rendering or a prototype of your packaging so you don't waste any time or money reprinting. You don't have to take all of their advice, but very often they can help make or break the sales of your product.
2) Don't Stand out in all of the wrong ways
Of course you want to stand apart from your competition. You have decided that you want your product packaged in an unusual shape. This can work to your advantage if the package fits within the retailers planogram but if it doesn't, this can be a disaster. We had a client relay the following story to us. They had placed their product in a wedge-shaped box. This posed a couple of different problems. First, it made the package deeper than it needed to be so not as many product could be pegged at one time. In addition, it made it so multiple boxes couldn't be master packed efficiently. Some times you just need to fit in and not stand apart. As a result of this packaging faux pas, they were kicked off the shelf after the product sold out.
3) Use color to your advantage
Let's say your corporate color is gray and red. Your brand team preaches consistency---as they should. But in your largest retailer, their backers and pegs are grey. Your packages are large fields of gray and you don't do any in-store shelf test. After your product is in store and pegged it blends into the background and looks like a gray hole. Oh, and one other thing, your closest competitor also uses grey but it is a darker gray with more contrast to pop off the shelf. If you have to bend the rules for this product, and it makes sense, then do it. Perhaps the box can be white with accents of grey and red. This still maintains brand consistency but let's the product pop.
Everyone has made packaging mistakes. Even the big guys. Remember Tropicana?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23adcol.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Patty Jensen
pjensen@jdainc.com
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