How Your Packaging Could Be Hurting Your Business

What comes to mind when you think of marketing? If you’re like many, your mind drifts to television commercials, radio spots and online ads. While many marketing plans do include those things, marketing actually involves more. In fact, marketing involves everything necessary to sell a product, including the product’s packaging.

What Is Product Packaging?

In its basic form, product packaging is simply what its name implies — the manner in which an item is wrapped, boxed or bagged before it’s sold. Some items, such as food products, are packaged a certain way for safety reasons. Other items are packaged in a way that’s specifically designed to relay information to consumers.

If you look at product packaging in the context of marketing, it’s more than a way to keep products safe and share information. Product packaging is the process of designing, producing and using packaging to both package and sell products. When you view product packaging in this light, it’s easy to see that packaging is a big part of marketing that can heavily influence sales.

Packaging Effects on Business

According to the authors of Essentials of Marketing, product packaging has four marketing purposes, including:

• Containing and protecting a product
• Promoting the product it contains
• Helping consumers use the product
• Facilitating recycling and minimizing damage to the environment

While the functions outlined above are certainly important, successful product packaging does even more. Product packaging represents your brand and image, delivers your sales message, develops goodwill and shows consumers you share their values. It also provides product details such as nutritional information. Packaging makes your products stand out on stores shelves as well.

Have you asked yourself the following question: “Why is my product failing?” The answer may be because your packaging is failing to deliver on its full marketing potential. If you doubt that the way your product is packaged influences sales, consider this — a study published in Psychology & Marketing showed that attractive packaging stimulates activity in areas of the brain that are associated with rewards, while unattractive packaging generates activity in areas related to negative emotions. Because emotions are intertwined with buying decisions, it’s easy to see that poor packaging can lead to lost sales and revenue.

How to Change a Product Package

If your product packaging is costing you sales, it’s time to make some changes. In other words, your packaging has to deliver what the consumers in your target market want it to.

While the demands of your niche market may vary, here are a few things that many consumers want product packaging to have:

• Relevant Information: When you’re creating a new packaging design, you need to ensure the end result will deliver relevant information clearly and simply. This will help shoppers identify your product and brand and make it easier for them to find your product on store shelves.
• Practicality: Consumers want packaging that’s practical to use. Whether your packaging is resealable or it can be used for storage once your product is consumed, shoppers want packaging that fits their lifestyle.
• Green Packaging: With lifestyles in mind, remember that a lot of consumers are looking for green packaging they can either recycle or repurpose.

Prototype Packaging: A New Package

Developing a new product package is easy when you work with Phase 1 Prototypes. For more than 10 years, we’ve helped businesses in various industries develop new packages for their products. Once we receive your final design, we’ll make prototypes you can test with focus groups to make sure your new packages realize their full marketing potential.

We don’t require our valued clients to order a set minimum of prototypes like some of our competitors do. You can order 500 units or less when you work with us. This flexibility keeps your costs low as you’re creating a new packaging design.

To learn more about our services, contact Phase 1 Prototypes today.

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