How can you create more powerful packaging design?
We encounter a lot of packaging in our day-to-day lives, from the trusted brands we know and love to new products that catch our eyes as we walk past them in stores. On any given day, we touch more than 50 different packaging designs.
Your packaging design is a critical brand asset. It is the primary embodiment of your brand. Your pack design can help you best competition on the shelf, as well as strengthen implicit associations and preferences when the product is being used. Packaging also plays a critical role in addressing circularity goals and environmental issues.
This triggers a very important question:
How can you create more powerful packaging design?
Taking a step back
Two years ago, we published our first meta-learning, providing nine best practice guidelines to creating powerful packaging design. The framework is centered around the central roles that packaging design plays: being visible and findable; appealing to the senses; communicating who and what your product is and why it should be purchased—and being very persuasive, at that.
Nine best practice creative guidelines towards more powerful packaging design
VISIBILITY
Use contrast to create stand-out
Leverage (branded) visual assets for instant brand recognition and to facilitate speed of decision making
Unite the line & differentiate the variants
COMMUNICATION
Ensure that the design contains all the design recipe ingredients
Make sure to follow the recipe and the order in which to add the ingredients
Ensure congruence between visual, structural and textual design elements
Design for what it’s worth
PERSUASION
Design to both generic main category drivers and distinctive brand choice drivers
Find a proper balance between visibility, communication & persuasion
The ultimate key takeout was that pack design is a balancing act: Creating a design that is strong in terms of visibility, communication AND persuasion is very challenging.
To better understand how to master that balancing act – and to create packaging design that is truly powerful and strong in terms of the three central roles: visibility, communication and persuasion—we created additional meta-learning.
In our new 2019 white paper
(a follow-up to that published in 2017),
we are sharing:
Advanced modeling that quantifies what creates “powerful packaging design”
More granular creative design best practices to optimize those elements that matter most
Practical success and risk factors when conducting a (re)design initiative.
