7 Tips for Impactful Packaging Design
If you want customers to walk straight to your product in the store, and if you want your sales to go up, you need to spend some time coming up with great packaging design.
Your product’s packaging can heavily influence whether or not customers will toss your product in your cart.
Take a look at these seven elements that make up the best packaging design.
1. Make Your Design Clear
Your product has about four seconds to capture a customer’s attention. And in those four seconds, your product has to answer at least two questions.
These questions are:
- What is the product for?
- What is the product’s brand?
These two things may seem simple, but they can actually be harder to find than you think. If there are too many other things on your product packaging, the purpose of the product and the brand behind it can get lost in the jumble.
In some cases, you may find one but not the other. Perhaps the product is clearly a cleaning solution, but the brand name is hidden. Or maybe the brand name is all you can see and what the product’s actually used for remains a mystery.
So keep your packaging simple and clear. People should be able to tell what your product and brand name are as soon as they look at it.
Keeping it in product appropriate packaging will make things easier for you and your customers. In other words, the packaging should fit the product. Don’t make that cleaning solution look like a bottle of juice.
2. Be Honest
Have you ever bought a food product because of how delicious it looked on the package? But then you take it home and open it only to find it looks almost nothing like the picture.
The only thing this type of packaging design will do for you is decrease your sales.
Because people think they are getting one thing when they buy the product, they are very disappointed when they find out it’s almost nothing alike. This will cause your sales to go down and give your brand name a bad image.
Packaging that makes your product look better than it is will actually mislead your customers.
This doesn’t mean you have to make your product look bland or unappetizing. Your product can still look great even if you don’t add extra incentives to the packaging.
3. Leave Room to Grow
You may only have one product right now, but as your business grows, you’ll probably end up with several more.
If and when that happens, all of your products must have similar packaging. This will let your customers know they’re from the same brand. It will also help your products draw more attention in the shopping aisle.
That means your designs must work just as well for your lavender scented deodorant as your coconut-scented deodorant.
When you’re coming up with your packaging design, don’t pick something that’s only going to look good for one product. For example, the design for your lavender deodorant looks great, but if you switch the lavender flowers for coconuts, the design just doesn’t work anymore.
Always create your packaging design with the future in mind. Pick designs you can easily build off of or alter for your other products.
4. Create Something Original
Your products won’t get a lot of attention if they look exactly the same as the thousands of other products you’re competing against. The only way to set yourself apart from your competitors is to be different.
So before you create your packaging design, take a look at what your competitors have done.
Do they have photographs of their product on their packaging? Use an illustrated image for your packaging instead. Do they package their products in cans? Find a way to use a bottle or a box. Do their designs go vertically across their packaging? Make yours go horizontally.
No matter what your competitors are doing, find a way to do something different. Authenticity and originality are key elements of great packaging design.
5. Make Your Packaging Practical
A lot of people overlook the practicality of their packaging, but if done right, this type of packaging can make your sales go up.
When it comes to practicality, this has more to do with the shape and size of your product’s packaging, not the design or branding of a package. This comes down to thinking of things like functionality. How can you make your packaging easier to store, use, carry, etc.
Take Heinz Ketchup for example.
They originally sold their ketchup in a normal bottle, but when they turned this bottle upside down, their sales took off. And all because it’s easier and more practical to use a ketchup bottle that’s upside down.
That’s what you need to consider for your product. What can you do that will make your packaging more practical for your customers?
6. How Does It Look on the Shelf?
Before settling with your final packaging design, make sure you know how your product will look on a shelf. Sometimes the design you think will look the best just blends in with everything else.
Practice this on your own by surrounding your product with several other products and see if it draws people’s attention (make sure you have several columns of the products). A customer will only take a closer look at your product if it stands out from the things around it.
What you’re looking for is called shelf impact, and a product with better shelf impact will have much better sales.
7. Set a Reasonable Budget
You never want to spend too much on your product packaging, and your budget should center around how much your actual product costs.
Low-cost products should have low-cost packaging. But it can be worth spending a bit of extra money on packaging for products that sell at a higher price.
This is another reason to keep your designs simple and clear. If you over design your packaging, especially for a low-cost product, you’ll be spending a lot more money on your packaging than you should.
Set a budget at the beginning of your design process, and stick to it.
How to Design Great Packaging
Coming up with great packaging design for your products is a lot more work than just throwing your products in a box. But if you follow these steps, you can create product packaging that stands out from the rest, that displays your brand name clearly, and that is easy for your customers to use.
Need some help creating your packaging? Get in touch and we’ll give you the help you need.
Great Article, Mike. I agree that the design needs to be simple, while getting the message across. Often, companies get carried away with everything they want the customer to know about them. It’s important to think from the customer’s perspective and focus on the main benefit of using the product. Also, what you’ve mentioned about how the package looks on the shelf is critical, since it should be readable from a distance.
Your advice to be honest with your packaging so people know what they’re getting and will trust your brand name would be important. In order to do this, you might want to find a reliable and experienced packaging company. Working with professionals could help you find a design that is honest and will attract customers to ensure they understand everything you have to offer.