Packaging
As a brand agency, we approach every project and problem we solve with an unwavering focus on the brand. With deep expertise in consumer goods, the brands we build are often expressed primarily or most immediately through package design.
Packaging is more than a container. It is one of the most intimate ways a person will experience your brand. They take it in with their eyes, hold it in their hands, bring it into their home, and even put it to their lips. Packaging represents more consumer daily impressions than any other communications medium.
Packaging is an opportunity. Of all the brand touchpoints experienced by consumers, none offer a more potent chance to connect emotionally with your audience. It is reported that 72% of Americans state that a product’s packaging design influences their purchase decisions. For established brands, packaging is as vital as marketing for maintaining recognition and building trust and affinity. For new brands or limited budgets, packaging is your marketing and advertising.
Packaging Psychology & Emotions
Understanding the psychology and emotional landscape of product packaging is a game changer that can profoundly influence consumer perception and behavior. It can give your brand a strategic edge and an unfair advantage in a competitive marketplace.
Emotions play a significant role in shoppers’ decision-making and often overshadow rational considerations. Tapping into emotional triggers like nostalgia, joy, or belonging can summon powerful responses that drive purchase decisions. Understanding your audience’s emotional mindset empowers packaging design that fosters authentic connection and cultivates brand loyalty.
The best packaging design creates an opportunity for your products to entice your audience, pique curiosity, tell a story, inform, surprise, and delight. It is a powerful asset that fights for your brand in stores and online, seizing shoppers’ attention with shelf presence and scroll-stopping impact.
Product Perception & Perceived Value of Your Brand
The benefits of strong package design go beyond emotional connection and purchase intent. Expertly designed packaging layers cues that tell consumers a myriad of things about your brand without them having to read a single word. Deft combinations of color, shape, imagery, materiality, texture, and words can immediately evoke an essence of sophisticated luxury, youthful exuberance, established dependability, or rebellious spirit. Product packaging design should activate communication strategy.
Effective packaging artfully weaves verbal and visual cues to craft a compelling narrative that captivates consumers. Packaging is a promise of the value of the product inside, building and growing the perceived value of your brand. Combining a bold packaging promise with a quality product experience is lightning in a bottle.
Packaging Creates Brand Recognition, Trust & Affinity
Smart, creative packaging design is vital to growing your brand. Brands grow by creating recognition, fostering affinity, and building trust.
Market research shows the less a seller is recognized along a customer journey, the more likely shoppers are to buy from another business, especially if the offerings are similar. With more consumer impressions than any other medium, packaging plays an immense role in creating brand recognition. A great example is our packaging services for Austin Beerworks. By boldly contrasting the ubiquitous packaging trends in craft beer, we created recognition for a small craft brewery that spanned beyond its home and state across the globe.
Visual hierarchy, message pacing, color billboarding, and impression hierarchy all maximize visibility, brand recognition, and retention. We carefully consider each of these and even employ eye-tracking software to optimize recognition to lightning speed.
Packaging is a vital tool for building trust in your brand. It promises the value of the products inside. Product perception directly drives purchase decisions and builds and grows the perceived value of your brand. Materiality, construction, package architecture, production finishes, and visual and verbal design tell your audience your brand deserves their trust—or does not. Getting packaging production right is such a crucial factor for inspiring trust that we have a number of team members whose jobs focus solely on that piece of the packaging puzzle.
Shoppers can recognize multiple brands on the shelf and trust that more than one delivers the same value. Retail shoppers care about more than costs. When multiple brands offer similar items at similar prices and levels of trust, buyers choose the option they like more. Packaging is a key instrument in building that affinity.
Packaging can help spark affinity for your brand in many ways. Aesthetics, tone, personality, and point of view are just a few factors that can impact people in different ways. A great example of this is the packaging and unboxing experiences we built for Tecovas and Everlywell. Both show a carefully crafted and artfully paced experience, with meaningful moments designed into every step, from the minute they are received and opened. Great packaging doesn’t just tell a story about the product. It tells a story about the benefits it brings the buyer, how it can make them feel, and what it says about them to the world.
Innovation, Trends & Sustainability
As a brand agency focused on packaging design services, we harbor a deep love for packaging from the past and present. A quick scan of our studio will reveal product and food packaging from multiple locations, often spanning the globe: vintage oil cans from the Northeast, a box of tinned fish from Sweden, dispensary bottles from the South, and hundreds of other artifacts squirreled away in the name of research. On any given workday there are custom packaging supplies, material samples, and prototypes shipping in or out of the studio. Research and obsession are close cousins.
Innovation
We study packaging from yesterday and today, but what about tomorrow? Innovation is at the heart of effective packaging design. In an era where consumers are constantly seeking new experiences, brands must stay ahead of the curve with innovative packaging solutions. This can include anything from smart packaging with QR codes that provide additional product information to eco-friendly materials that speak to environmentally conscious consumers.
If you’d like to see an even more whimsical and dramatic example of innovation’s impact, check out the world’s first 99-pack of beer.
Market Trends
Packaging design is shooting at a moving target. Consumer preferences and market trends change frequently and shift wildly. Micro-eras of minimalism give way to maximalism, and classical aesthetics usher in the emergence of brutalism in design. Keeping up with market trends is essential for staying relevant and competitive. That does not necessarily mean that you should follow them—a healthy brand should have its eyes on the horizon and ensure its packaging doesn’t drown in a “sea of sameness.”
Sustainability
In recent years, sustainability has become a critical concern for consumers and brands alike. Environmentally friendly packaging reduces the ecological footprint and appeals to a growing segment of eco-conscious consumers. Brands that prioritize sustainable packaging send the world a message that they are thoughtful, responsible, and forward-thinking, which can enhance their reputation and customer loyalty. As a packaging design agency, we aim to integrate design for reuse, compostability, zero waste, alternative plastics, and other solutions into the conversation each time we develop packaging.
Wrap Up
It’s difficult to overstate the value of packaging services in building and growing your brand. Custom boxes, bottles, pouches, and vials impact far more than supply chain. Investing in smart packaging design is a wise strategic move for entrepreneurs, marketing managers, and company leaders looking to elevate their brands. It’s not just about making your product look good; it’s about creating an experience that connects with consumers on multiple levels.
Whether you’re launching a new product or rebranding an existing one, don’t underestimate the power of exceptional packaging design. It’s an investment that pays off in consumer trust, loyalty, and, ultimately, your bottom line. You’ll be happy you made it.
