The Package IS the Product!

The Christmas season is upon us, and children young and old take great pleasure in wrapping gifts for loved ones and friends.

Now, a little family history here... my mother, Head Wrapper of our household at Christmas, was not one to 'fuss' with wrapping to make gifts look like those found in store displays.

As a Capricorn born in the Chinese Year of the Goat, "pragmatic" should have been her middle name. No sense investing a lot of time in making it look 'perfect'. Or buying expensive and difficult-to-maneuver foil paper and wrestling with superfluous curly bows. She had four kids ranging in age from two to 15 ripping everything to shreds inside 10 minutes on Christmas morning. So why bother?

Heck, larger gifts would get wrapped in the Regina Leader Post Sunday comics.

Wha-a-a-at? It was colorful!

To this day, I admit, a certain amount of Mom's practicality has rubbed off. Although my husband refuses to let me wrap anything in newspaper, I do tend to save the 'fancy' paper for special gifts. If it's REALLY special, it gets a stick-on bow! Ooooooo.... the anticipation to open THAT one...

A-HA! There it is.

YOU know what I mean! You see that one gift under the tree, the one with the Martha Stewart treatment. The big fluffy bow atop a thick foil embossed paper with the hand-made card... and YOUR name on it! And you just KNOW it's THEE gift!

The packaging influenced your opinion of its contents!

Think for a moment, back to this Christmas shopping season. How many times did a package influence your decision to buy?

An episode of "The Shopping Bags" in 2007 looked at the effects of packaging on our purchasing behavior. And no surprise to this designer, research indicates that consumers are heavily influenced by the packaging of products.

It's the kind of subtle nuances that experienced designers know get results. In one case, tasters said that the pop from a can with more yellow on it had a more refreshing taste. And that when sampling canned meat, tasters thought the one that came from the can with the photo of the meat – with a spring of parsley on top – tasted more homemade.

In their own live case study, the ladies conducted taste tests of various ranch salad dressings. When the samples were 'blind' (tasters could not see the label) tasters showed a preference for a store brand over leading national brands.

But when tasters saw the bottle displayed, over half chose a highly recognized national brand name dressing, simply because the packaging was more attractive. They expect that the national brand is the better quality product.

So what does all this mean?

Package design is not just about fulfilling a function, or even about making something look nice.

It's about building a brand.

"Packaging will become even more integrated with the product in function, branding, and merchandising," says Duane McDonald, Senior Manager of Package Production at Kimberly-Clark Corp. "It has to do its part in delivering the brand promise to consumers. Graphics and aesthetics will be more important."

Robert Henry Hall, Vice President of Brand Development at Boston Beer Co., describes this brand promise as "an emotional benefit of style. The design makes the consumer feel a certain way through the product and package use."

From www.shelfimpact.com (2005)

Building a brand is really about creating an experience for your customer.

Remember that 'special' gift under the Christmas tree? The one that you just know is THEE gift, meant especially for you, the one you just KNOW you're going to love, with that 'extra personal touch' added to it to make it stand out? THAT is the sensation you want to create for your audience. The "I-just-can't-WAIT-to-see-what's-inside!" feeling.

A good package design doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of money, or be wasteful in its excess. The key to great package design is to make sure it gives a hint about the wonders that await inside.

If you are creating a product that will require packaging and labeling, put pragmatism aside. Spring for the foil embossed paper and huge curly bows to give your customers that 'wow' feeling of anticipation. Get a professional designer to create the package that ignites that emotion.

Unless of course you want to give the impression that your brand is about finding new ways to reuse the Sunday funnies.