What so many businesses fail to realise the first time is the way in which the packaging you use for any given product can be just as important as the product itself. In fact, it could be fair to say that the packaging and labelling you choose will have a larger say in your product’s early success than the product within for the simple reason that until you manage to earn a solid and widespread reputation for what it is you’re offering, you’ll be reliant on the packaging and labelling to sell it on your behalf.
According to the experts at Days Labels, the labelling you choose for any given product represents the first and most important frontier or your entire marketing strategy. For newer brands and products especially, you have no more than a few seconds to capture your audience’s attention, hold it for long enough to facilitate a closer inspection and then seal the deal with a sale. It’s a tricky act to pull off to say the least and one that requires a very specific formula – a formula often laid to waste by one of many common and easily-made mistakes.
Here’s a quick overview of just a few examples in order to help you avoid making them for the sake of your own brand and product:
Forgetting Your Audience
First of all, there’s nothing more important throughout the design, manufacture and marketing processes than remembering who your audience members are and what makes them tick. The reason being that you’ll need to carefully craft everything in line with their needs, tastes and general outlooks on life – something that stretches all the way through to product packaging. If you’re looking to win over naturalists with eco-friendly tastes in cereals for example, you’re not going to approach the packaging the same as if you were marketing dolls to eight-year-old girls – an obvious example but a firm illustrator of the point nonetheless.
Making it Cryptic
Something else to avoid at all costs is the habit of being too cryptic, despite how tempting it might be to try and be ‘clever’ with your packaging. In many cases, brands choose to make their packaging either nondescript or vague in order to pique curiosity and prompt a closer look. But while this can work, the more common response to such labelling and packaging is to not know what it is and to therefore ignore it in favour of something more obvious. Intriguing can work wonders – vague on the other hand rarely hits home.
Blending In With Rivals
In the same vein however, it’s just as important to make sure that the design you come up with doesn’t look too obvious to such an extent that it blends in with the other 1,000 similar items around it. There are certain designs and colour choices for most products that have been done to death and while keeping with convention to a certain extent is important, it’s not as important as making sure your product stands out.
Poor Quality Printing
If you come up with a fantastic product packaging design and a truly award-worthy label, you’ll find your efforts wholly laid to waste if you then use poor or low-quality printing techniques to get the thing out in the open. There’s really no bigger turn-off for the consumer than seeing a product that looks as if it’s been thrown together for the cheapest possible price with no real thought, even though the package may not in fact be an accurate representation of what’s inside. It’s a case of acknowledging that if you’re going to do the job right, this means doing your product justice inside and out.
Signs of Desperation
Last but not least, back to the subject of standing out from the crowd for a moment – you should always be sure to note whether the packaging and label designs you’ve come up with are bold and eye-catching or simply desperate. There are so many occasions in which what could have been a wonderfully successful product has its chances destroyed by a label or packaging that’s either overly loud and brash, too similar to a big-brand rival or in some other way basically ‘begs’ the would-be buyer to buy it. The idea is to win over their attention and trust subtly and in accordance with the merit of the product – not by simply screaming “Please for the love of all that’s Holy buy me now or miss out forever!” or words to that effect.