Highly Persuasive Packaging Design

The package that you sell your product in, especially in consumer products, absolutely needs to be the most persuasive packaging you can produce. Typically, your package exists on a retail shelf with all your competitors surrounding the package. You want a customer standing in front of this section to choose your product far more than others. To do that, your package needs to do some heavy selling. You can only accomplish this through graphic design.

Your package design needs to accomplish many very challenging objectives.

1. Grab attention: in the cluttered competitive retail environment, your product needs to capture the customer’s eye. You have a few tools to help you with this. First, you can use a distinctive package shape and size that make you look different and hopefully better than the competition. Second, the package design needs to be relevant and attractive for the customer to spend more than a nano second looking at your package.

2. Sell: having captured a customer's attention, they then pay closer attention to your package design. The customer has a need. Your package needs to tell them quickly and easily the benefit they will receive if they buy your product. In effect you are saying to them, "buy me, because I understand your need and my benefit is exactly the one you need right now."

3. Win: while grabbing attention and selling are very important, these tasks do not exist in a vacuum. There are competitors all around your package. You need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors as well as your own product. Your package design needs to accentuate how your product is better than the competitive products. Customers are not going to buy multiple products to meet a need. They are looking for the one product that will meet their need perfectly the first time.

Remembering these critical elements can help you to achieve graphic design solutions that consistently win in the marketplace. In briefing a graphic design company about your needs, be sure that you have thought through the competitive matrix in which your product exists and how you think you can win.

Winning Long-Term with Graphic Design.

Too many companies underestimate the power of their ability to win with graphic design. They think that graphic design is primarily to communicate facts to a potential buyer – like nutritional information and how to use the product. Yes, graphic design needs to do this. But graphic design can and must do much more.

Marketing graphic design is a design direction where there is a strong awareness of what it takes to get customers to buy the product. When this is an element of a graphic design project, the design direction is strongly defined by customers – for example, demographics, and their likes and dislikes.

When working with graphic design companies make sure that your design guidance includes customer perspectives that can dramatically improve your results.

1. Age demographics: the design elements that are most relevant to a millennial are very different than those that are most relevant to someone of the Boomer generation. Make sure your design company knows exactly whom you want your design to persuade to buy your product.

2. Income demographics: in many products this can be a key differentiator. For example, if it is an expensive product bought by people with higher incomes, the quality elements in the design will need to be very high.

Another very important element is making sure that there is strong guidance for branding graphic design. This can be the big picture impression you want your design to achieve. In many cases, it is the design elements that strongly and quickly differentiate your product versus competition.

For example, in the detergent aisle, Tide has created extraordinary branding graphic design equity – the orange color of its bottle. Loyal users in whatever store they go into to buy detergent are visually looking for "the orange package." In the business-to-business world, John Deere has created an exceptionally strong visual equity. It's iconic green equipment with yellow communication elements makes a product that you can immediately know even from a great distance.