The importance of product packaging isn’t hidden from any manufacturer or production company. Everyone knows that the packaging of a product is as significant as the product itself. So, every company wants to develop a strong and meaningful packaging strategy for their products.
A packaging strategy should align with the goals and principles of a company, the need of consumers and the product as well. Moreover, the packaging of every product of your company depends on the effectiveness of your packaging strategy. That’s why; developing a packaging strategy is a challenging task.
People who are struggling to create an effective packaging strategy for their company should read this article till the end. Yes, you will find the ways or the steps to create an ideal packaging strategy here. To know more, keep reading on.
- Discover Organisational Goals:
To create a strategy, you first need to gather the background knowledge that will be essential in determining the whole plan of action. In the case of packaging, you need to discover the goals of your organization. Knowing the general goals of the company isn’t a very difficult task.
For example, many companies focus on sustainability and environment friendliness. So, this is an easily visible goal that these companies would consider while forming their packaging strategies.
But, you need to go a little deeper to create an ideal packaging strategy. You should understand not only the general organizational goals but also the specific industry and the goals of stakeholders.
Doing industry analysis will help you in knowing the basic essentials of packaging in your particular industry. You will also be familiarised with the packaging trends of your industry. Understanding the goals of stakeholders will enhance the effectiveness of your packaging strategy as you will be able to cover their expectations as well through your strategy.
- Determine Objectives to meet the Organisational Goals:
Objectives are the steps that you will take in order to fulfill the organizational goals that you have discovered earlier. Objectives will help in setting day-to-day activities for meeting the big goals of packaging.
Every company have different goals so; they will have to set unique objectives as per these goals. In short, there is no set formula for this. However, you can understand it better through an example.
Suppose your organizational goal is to promote environment-friendly packaging. So, your objectives will be related to that only. Now, in this case, some of your objectives can be creating guidelines and policies to follow a sustainable approach of packaging, finding the best packaging materials and designs that are environment-friendly, selecting an environment-friendly color palette, etc.
In this way, you will create more specific objectives or the tasks to do for each and every organizational goal. These objectives will help you in moving from general or broader to specific or narrow tasks.
- Consider the Functions that your Packaging should Fulfil:
Product packaging is meant to fulfill some functions. Knowing these functions is very important to create an ideal product packaging strategy. Your packaging will be able to play those roles only if you will consider them before making your packaging strategy. Let’s see the common functions of any packaging that you can consider:
- Safety: The first and foremost function that packaging must play is keeping a product secure from everything that can spoil it. Packaging can’t be useful if it fails in protecting the product from any exterior harm.
- Convenience: The convenience of the user is another function that every packaging should play. The packaging is convenient only if it provides a good experience to the user. Opening it, storing it and using it should be convenient for the users.
- Functionality: The product packaging should be functional in order to keep the product in its initial shape, size, taste, etc. If a company focuses on the product freshness, then the package should be able to maintain it.
- Promotion: The packaging of a product should also promote the brand as well as the particular product.
- Communication: The packaging communicates with the buyers. It should tell the buyers about the ingredients of a product, the way to use it and other necessary information related to the product.
- Packaging differentiation: The packet of a product also helps in making the product different from all the other products available in the market. This function of packaging provides a unique identity to your product.
- Brand Reinforcement: The packaging of products is used for brand promotion purposes also. The colors, shapes, typography, etc. of all the product packages build the identity of a brand together.
You should always consider all these things while curating the packaging strategy for your products.
- Find the Unique Elements of the Products:
Now, you need to discover the unique elements of your products and services. As we all know, the market is full of many similar products. So, in this scenario, you need to find the highlighting things that make your product different from others.
Knowing these things or the highlighting points of your product and brand will assist you in promoting these through your packaging strategy. For example, a brand uses all the natural ingredients to create cosmetics. Now, this is a point that makes the brand and its products stand out.
In this case, this particular brand will use this feature while creating the packaging strategy. They will create some content or some symbol to showcase people this special quality of their products.
By seeing this example, it’s clear that knowing the plus points of your products is an essential part of developing a successful packaging strategy.
By following all these ways or steps, you can create an exceptional product packaging strategy for any brand.