Why Is Packaging an Integral Strategy for Effective Product Marketing?

An effective and creative packaging is a multi-pronged strategy in addressing multiple aspects of a product. It plays a vital role not just in marketing a company’s product, but also ensures its containment, protection, promotion, usefulness, as well as environmental impact. Packaging is powerful because it tells consumers why your product and brand are different from the rest. It can be a deciding factor in promoting your marketing strategy and boosting overall sales of your product.

Businesses around the world are spending more than $150 billion in product packaging annually. The fact that an attractive packaging can have a huge impact on buying decisions of the customers also makes it an important tool for product marketing. A compelling quote by Alina Wheeler has taken the value of packaging to a completely new dimension: “Packaging design is intelligence made visible”.

Packaging — A Potent Marketing Strategy

In most occasions, rather than making rational, informed decisions, shoppers’ buying behaviors are purely instinctive and reactive. Considering a supermarket setting where there are thousands of products being lined up on shelves and shoppers have a very short duration of time to gauge these products before making their minds to buy a select few. This is where marketers come up with creative punchlines, shapes, color combinations & juxtapositions to trigger instinctive reactions in the subconscious mind of consumers. This sensory impact approach helps businesses instantly connect emotionally with customers so that they can sell more and more products.

The fact is your product packaging is the core of your marketing mix, which entails how well your strategy is beneficial for you. In a nutshell, packaging shows off your product in a good light, displays its price and value in a best possible way, effectively communicates its benefits to consumers, and it physically appears in your various distribution channels.

An appropriately packaged product is more likely to convince a consumer towards buying it. Apart from providing the protection to the product, a package carries vital information about its various features. For example, shoppers can read directions of product usage, promotional information that focuses on the closing of the sale.

Packaging — A Powerful Promotional Strategy

Promotion is a significant part of successful branding, which is what most of the marketers consider at the heart of what they would do with the help of packaging. It is all about presenting the product in most effective and unique manner in order to draw consumers in and elicit a positive emotional response from them. Over the years, with growing consumerism in masses and competition among various businesses, promotional strategies have significantly evolved. It is not enough to traditionally print advertisements and carry out cold sales calls to turn prospects into potential leads.
Today’s scenario, however, requires a wide range of techniques and strategies on the part of businesses to get their products noticed and to draw consumers’ attention towards them.

Product packaging has an enormous potential in the promotion of a company and its products. Once consumers get a firsthand positive experience about a particular product, they tend to educate and influence their peers based on their feedback. Today, businesses are also organizing seminars, conferences, trade shows, and special events to promote their products and bringing them out to customers. Therefore, such events need product packaging as eye-catching, attractive, intuitive, as well as functional.
As a matter of truth, even if your product is best on the market, but if it lacks a creative and innovative packaging, it could be counter-productive for you. Which is why, marketing experts consider packaging as the main tool that represents the product’s overall functionality and relevance. It is the first and foremost thing people notice and has the ability to catch and divert their attention within seconds.

In terms of an effective marketing and communicating tool for your business, packaging has following important functions:

1. It Differentiates Your Brand

As we know, there are millions of products on online and offline markets trying to get consumers’ attention. Since, one-third of consumers make their decision of buying a product entirely on product packaging, your approach has to stand apart from that of your competitors’. It needs attractive package design and a relevant punch line for the product, which must be eye-catching as well as completely different from the rest.

2. Packaging Color Affects Consumer Buying Behavior

Studies have suggested that various color combinations used in packaging make a powerful impact in consumer buying decisions. Different colors stimulate different reactions from consumers, and you need to carefully choose them in your packaging. For example, the masterstroke of Coke’s perfect packaging strategy is the inclusion of agitated red color with dynamic and wavy white calligraphy, which has surely amplified the brand experience. Experts have also suggested that the more colors are added to a product package, the less sophisticated the product will be.

3. Packaging Develops Brand Recognition

If you remind yourself of your favorite brands, you will find one thing common in all of them — they are permanently etched in your memory. There are few brands that have over the decades made minor or no changes in their packaging and have stayed true to their original form. Their logo, color, and packaging style have become synonymous to the products themselves. Again, Coca-Cola is a prime example of this.

Conclusion

Product packaging has indeed become a potent tool for marketing a product. It helps brands communicate their values, missions, and qualities that make their products so demanding. It goes a long way in the success of a business. If you are a business owner, especially an entrepreneur, it is high time you have paid a close attention to the intricacies of your packaging in order to succeed in this marketing game.