Packaging is designed to hold, protect and enhance the shelf life of your products but it’s also one of the first impressions potential customers can have of your brand.

Product packaging has the power to support and aid your brand’s marketing efforts, engage the right target groups, and convey your brand’s core messages and mission to your customers. It can offer them an experience beyond the functional, exciting them about their new purchase or even acting as a status symbol amongst their peers that they’ve made a purchase from a desirable brand. 

Here’s what you need to know about intentional product packaging design, and why creative packaging design is important for selling a product.

5 Steps to Impactful Product Packaging Design

Impact

Your choice of packaging presents you with a unique opportunity to make your brand and products stand out from the crowd and set you apart from your immediate competitors.

Aside from common elements, such as brand name, logo and color palette, your packaging can immediately and impactfully communicate certain values, ethos or purpose – such as sustainable package design or social good – purpose over and above just informing about the product. In competitive markets with a wealth of choice, your brand values or mission statement can be the deciding purchase factor.

Premium and luxury packaging design can also play a crucial role in enhancing the perceived value of a product and creating a memorable unboxing experience for consumers. These designs often incorporate high-quality materials, intricate detailing, and creative elements that reflect the brand’s identity and values.

Experience

Creating a holistic experience within product packaging draws consumers further into your brand world and encourages recurrent engagement – and, often, purchase.

Glossier’s unboxing experience encompasses every aspect of the brand values from the minimalist pink box, with the black italic logo across the seal to the bold reveal and reminder of its mission printed on the inside – ‘Skin first, make-up second’. Its renowned pink pouches protect the goods in transit – vital for a DTC born brand – and become a keepsake for reuse, reinforcing the sense of belonging and community that Glossier dedicates itself to fostering. 

Our signature and tactile whale-tail bottle design for Love Ocean sets out to capture the imagination of children, engage and educate them during the fun of bath-time about the importance of preserving and protecting our oceans, and the amazing creatures within it.  

Message

Packaging is a key touchpoint with which to convey both visual and verbal messaging – beyond just functional product information.

All design elements – from color to structure to texture – are important signifiers that, often subconsciously, influence people’s initial decisions about your brand or product. They can be vital in whether or not someone engages with, or picks up, your brand or product after the first glance. In fact, color alone has been shown to drive as much as 85% of our buying decisions.

Using your packaging to state, or suggest, your brand intent or ethos is becoming increasingly desirable. Today, a brand that can show it cares for its customers, the environment or about pertinent social issues will inevitably connect with consumers at a deeper level, win their trust and attract business – often for the long-term.

E-Cloth was born 25 years ago with a unique product technology at its core: smart microfibres that can clean the entire home with only water; doing away with the need for harsh chemicals. Our design expression for E-Cloth gives a bold and single-minded meaning to the letter ‘E’ which visually manifests into a distinctive packaging format and ownable language that defines E-Cloth’s qualities – easy, efficient, enduring and environmental. This language is used across all brand touchpoints including packaging, website, social media channels and advertising campaigns to communicate the brand’s point of difference and the desirability of its products.

Social Influence

The power of the digital space and social influence cannot be underestimated. Powerful, single-minded packaging design should work just as well in the digital as the physical space to help you secure valuable brand recognition and reach across all brand territories, platforms and channels.

For our global packaging redesign project for McDonald’s, we worked to elevate the brand’s packaging experience and realign it with their overall goal of modernizing the fast-food restaurant occasion. With evocative, easy-to-understand graphics – from the cool blue waves on the Filet-O-Fish® clamshell to the golden, melting cheese on the Quarter Pounder® with Cheese – the new packaging design is easily identifiable, joyful and simple, and always made for sharing! These new graphic icons transcend language meaning that they can come to life beyond the packaging – and especially through digital and social channels – and extend the reach and recognition of McDonald’s on a truly global scale.   

Turn to Pearlfisher for Packaging that Stands Out – And Sells

We have a proven track record in bringing to life creative and commercially effective packaging design. We’d love an opportunity to share and discuss!

Contact us to find out how we can elevate your packaging and transform it into a valuable part of your overall marketing approach.