The purpose of customized packaging has gone far beyond serving as a mere means of getting your product to the store as well as the consumer without causing any damage to it. Over the past couple of years, brands and sellers have realized that product packaging constitutes a powerful marketing and branding tool. Therefore, it requires the same attention and techniques used in other areas of marketing to maximize commercial success.
According to the estimates, over three-quarters of purchase decisions are made at the point of sale. 90% of consumers make a purchase after being attracted and appealed by the packaging. The studies further reveal that 85% of consumers make a purchase without even looking at the alternative options. Making purchase decisions is no simple matter. According to the study, the consumer buys only 0.7% of the available products in-store over a year, despite having a range of over 30,000 products from which to choose.
Therefore, consumers need to find, evaluate, and compare the products they wish to buy from the vast range of available products. Not all of the stores and outlets offer the charm of trying out the sample products. Therefore, your consumers are required to make the purchase decision based on the custom die cut packaging and branding. Several experts believe that consumers purchase a product based on its expected outcome and quality.
Therefore, The Legacy Printing suggests the designers and marketers to:
(1) Grab the consumer’s attention;
(2) Create positive associations and expectations in their minds (such as the expectation of a great result and quality experience) to ensure a product’s long-term commercial success.
Custom packaging boxes can help achieve these goals both at the point of sale and the point of consumption. However, the packaging company believes that there is a whole range of options and parameters of packaging design to consider when it comes to ensuring that the packaging transmits the most effective brand messaging, captures the attention of the consumer in-store, and achieves its full potential as a tool with which to enhance the product experience.
The team of packaging experts at The Legacy Printing has gone through several studies conducted over the last few decades. The team believes that in order to serve the clients with the best, they need to know how the various elements of product packaging contribute to these effects. These packaging studies and reports have outlined and highlighted several essential packaging design elements. These include color, packaging shape, weight, shape curvature, and typeface. Note that this list is not exhaustive.
The packaging company further suggests that the sight of the product through custom die cut packaging can trigger a diverse range of neurological and physiological responses among the consumers. For example, if the encased product is a food item, then the sight of the product can increase hunger, create favorable taste evaluations, and the priming of reward networks. Custom packaging boxes can enable the consumer to see the encased product in one of two ways. Either through the product images printed on the packaging or through the die cut windows. The prevalence of the latter approach has appeared to be on the rise, and this trend is believed to be adopted by the sellers and brands. Estimates from the US suggest that transparency is present between 20% to 77% of all packaging, depending on product category (20% of chips, 20% of cookies, 23% of crackers, 77% of nuts).
Positive Effects of Seeing The Encased Product
The packaging company believes that product images tend to constitute salient visual stimuli. Therefore, while creating the custom healthcare packaging and other packaging boxes, they tell their clients that it is a relatively cheap and easy means of attracting the attention of the customer in-store. The company has repeatedly highlighted that the phenomenon of ‘sensory-specific satisfaction can modulate consumer attention captured by food imagery.’
Sensory Specific Satisfaction Caused by Packaging
According to The Legacy Printing, this phenomenon suggests that satisfaction is specific to different sensory characteristics of the products. It means that a consumer can still be motivated to purchase another item even after being sated on another. Consumers who search for a specific product have also identified a similar mechanism of heightened cognitive bias towards product cues.
Product Imagery on Custom Packaging Boxes
Product images on the custom healthcare packaging can provide the brands and sellers an effective means of communicating with the consumers. The images help inform consumers concerning crucial product information. The package that incorporates a product image transmits information about the brand and product. It has the ability to create a positive brand impression or manipulate brand beliefs. Product imagery is a simple way for consumers to understand a product from its packaging and a possible way to give clarity to product and brand positioning. This product information obtained from imagery helps the consumers in conducting a direct comparison of products.
The brands are also suggested to replace the product’s textual information with visual information on the front of the packaging. By doing so, you can positively influence consumer’s purchase intentions. In a nutshell, impactful graphics on front-facing facets of packaging can stimulate instant sales. While there are many supporting reasons to advocate using product imagery on packaging, the brands need to take special care as imagery can also negatively impact the packaging aesthetics.
Aesthetically pleasing packaging designs can increase the desire to own the product, encourage the willingness to pay a higher price, and increase preference over other famous high-end brands. Furthermore, changing packaging designs for well-established brands can remove design elements that consumers rely on to identify the product. For instance, a global juice brand saw a drop of 20% in the sales of their orange juice in the US after redesigning the juice carton. An image of orange was replaced with a picture of a glass of orange juice. This simple change reportedly resulted in consumers not finding the product. The previous design had become integral to identifying the brand and represented an estimated $27.3 million loss in revenue due to reduced sales.
Therefore, thorough market research is strongly recommended for any potential packaging redesign to identify the impact on consumer evaluations and purchase behavior, thus ensuring market success and mitigating loss. Also, make sure that the imagery is not perceived as dishonest. Effective packaging must ultimately communicate effectively to consumers. Consumers usually feel tricked or duped by packaging, such as by images that are perceived as intentionally misleading (e.g., overly digitally enhanced images or have ‘healthy’ visual cues when this cannot be justified by looking at the product’s nutritional content).
Four Norms of Custom Packaging Design
A brand or company must follow four norms for the development of packaging design: the norms of truthfulness, sincerity, comprehensibility, and legitimacy. Consumers avoid the products that defy these norms, as it triggers feelings of deception. Thus, while product imagery does seem to convey many potentially positive benefits, care must be taken to avoid over-emphasizing the product visuals and being potentially dishonest. Conversely, using transparent windows as part of product packaging has been suggested to help dispel such perceptions of deception instead of helping to make the brand seem ‘honest.’
