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Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.”
Strong brands are able to tell the company’s story and advance its message while rendering a distinct personality in a crowded marketplace. It takes hard work to build a visual identity for any business that consumers can fall in love with. Packaging in all its phases of ideation, illustration, layout as well as storytelling forms a critical piece of the branding puzzle, becoming the ‘final point of contact’ so to speak, with the consumer on the brink of making a purchase decision.
Unforgettable packaging designs communicate category disruption and stand out on competitive store shelves to grab buyer attention.
As brands develop, package redesigning advances the message with each phase propelling the brand forward. Repackaging helps brands reposition themselves in order to reach new consumer demographics. It requires leaning into market research, competitor analysis, insights to inspire an unforgettable design. When rebranding, attention must be paid to preserve the legacy of the original so as to stay familiar for consumers, while creating a refreshed look to infuse a new direction. It requires coming full circle - retaining elements of where the brand started, where it intends to go and how it wants to impact consumer behaviour.
Achtung Baby!
Repackaging is a risk that can bring great rewards in return. But if handled poorly, it can go devastatingly south. Great packaging designs come from smart market research and well thought out strategies.
- Don’t snap the connection: When redesigning, brands shouldn’t tread too far away from what makes them familiar to their customer base. Often times purchase decision making is happening at a subconscious level in the brain, drawing consumers to your brand assets and associations. Becoming unfamiliar through repackaging holds the risk of confused consumers, missing you on the shelves altogether and alienating them. The pack design should instantly form a connection with the brand while intuitively delivering the message.
- Collaborate: Repackaging efforts need to answer critical questions like - what is the story we are attempting to tell? Does the new packaging tell that story well? Does it offer differentiation? Does it keep us true to our brand? Does it engage with the target consumer? These complex multi-layered questions are important for the brand and it requires research, qualitative studies, and expert insights. They also require an approach that integrates the strongly interconnected workings of the marketing, advertising, design as well as supply chain teams.
- Be bravely original: Imitation is not always flattering— so don’t be a copycat. Your target audience is out there. And they are an intelligent, hyper-aware, brutally digitized bunch. The best way to put off your audience is by showing yourself as a wannabe. Copying and packaging from the A+ brands diminish your brand to a ‘me-too’ product hurting brand equity in the long run. It will also open a pandora box of unnecessary legal hurdles. Businesses invest in repackaging initiatives to stand out and be noticed. Nothing builds a unique and memorable brand more than communicating integrity and maintaining originality. Brands sometimes also fall prey to the tendency to work backwards when redesigning their product rather than thinking ahead. For example, if a whisky product attempts to look too Scottish to borrow from its reputation of being a whiskey country, the result could be a ‘me-too’ design. These attempts to replicate existing tropes can result in portfolio stagnation, rather than disruptive identities with real proprietary value. Brands don’t need to leave their category to establish their own iconic assets and cues.
- The Semiotics Checklist: Packaging redesigning strategies must remain cognizant of the local landscape. India, for instance, is a country of 1.3bn people, where spoken language changes every 30 to 40 kilometres. There are currently 22 recognized languages in India with varying levels of English literacy. This makes the semiotics— which covers the visual cues and colour schemes on the packaging, more influential for interpretation and far more communicative of the brand identity than words. Using images, symbols rather than just text connects the audience quickly and effectively to the message.
- Test drive the strategy: Invest in a short-term test to evaluate the response. This point is best-driven home by the now overstated Tropicana repackaging fiasco. At the start of 2009, Tropicana’s new packaging for its fruit juice brand hit the shelves. This was rejected by their consumers resulting in a sharp drop in sales. While a temporary dip in sales is common after the redesign, a decline as severe as 20% prompted Tropicana to revert to the original packaging. This initiative costs Tropicana over 50 million dollars in total. So, while it may seem like a bit of an expense, but testing your packaging out will eliminate ambiguity and record consumer reactions. This will establish whether the new design packs your brand assets and engages the consumer senses as desired, without burning a canyon sized hole in your pocket by the time the verdict is in.
Repackaging is a great marketing tool in an environment where constant innovation and increasing competition keeps the best of brands on their proverbial toes. When done right, repackaging can breathe a fresh lease of life into stagnated or matured products putting them back into the growth stage. When Heinz, which incidentally has been selling ketchup since 1876, decided to repackage its ketchup bottle to make it fit better in the refrigerator compartments, it saw a drastic increase in sales.
Many times, good designs are often traded off for fear of failure in the market, resulting in incremental changes that are hardly even noticed by consumers. They, therefore, add little value to the already established equity in the market. So, while proceeding with awareness and caution is certainly advised, fear of failure shouldn’t deter marketers from innovating.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com