Julie Ward, business development manager, Medica Packaging02.05.14
Familiarity and recognition are vital cogs when building brand loyalty.
Can customers be expected to commit to your brand when you bombard them with different packaging options every other month?
Potential customers already find themselves swamped by hundreds of similarly branded and designed products, so taking away that instant familiarity can be a dangerous move for brands when attempting to build brand recognition and encourage loyalty in their customers.
Recognition stems from multiple factors.
Where packaging is concerned, it is predominantly dictated by color, form and feel. Morphing from one design to another limits the ease with which a consumer can identify your product when quickly scanning the shop shelves.
One week it’s blue, next month it’s red and before the year is out, you’ve had a veritable rainbow of colors in your packaging. How are your customers going to keep up?
If your packaging is undergoing regular and dramatic changes, you’re going to end up forcing your loyal brand followers into a game of hide-and-seek, making them root around the shelves trying to find their favorite product.
Take a look at Dove.
Simple soft colors of gold, blue and creams. While not particularly revolutionary, these colors are synonymous with gentleness, cleanliness, luxury—and more important, they are synonymous with the Dove brand values.
Now imagine if Dove released new packaging that used garish and brash pinks and neon yellows. It might catch the eye—and may give you a headache—but the big question is, would loyal brand followers miss their favorite products due to a loss of familiarity with the new design, and would the same values that Dove stands for be communicated as effectively?
That said, there are times in a product’s life cycle where change is necessary to rejuvenate its appeal to the consumer or to differentiate it from competitors.
This was the case with Olay ReGenerist, which found that it was surrounded on the shelf by pastels and pale colors favored by the personal care industry, losing any visual appeal its product may have amid the morass of similarly designed packages.
The brand decided to rely on the strength of its fan base and brand name and go against the tide. Olay launched a new packaging line utilizing a strong and striking combination of black and red to capture potential customers’ attention.
Ironically, this was seen as a cue for change among other anti-aging products, whose marketers understood that Olay’s consumers would now relate anti-aging to a sultry red and black color combo—and it wasn’t long before L’Oreal was joining the revolution in color.
Continuity is useless if it isn’t working in the first place.
Fearing the loss of loyal customers will always make manufacturers hesitant about a redesign, but if you are failing to tap fully into the market’s potential, then this same cautionary approach could be your undoing.
For example, staying aware of consumer trends can help you to make informed packaging designs. Take the shift in consumer awareness towards environmentally friendly or organically produced products.
There are other measures that can be taken to ensure brand loyalty, and they don’t necessarily fall into the appearance category.
For one, a color management system can be implemented to ensure quality color consistency throughout production runs, ensuring that clients’ packaging will always maintain its uniformity and continuity on the shelf.
Ask people about packaging, and the first thing that springs to mind is pretty shapes and eye-catching colors, but there are other considerations as well.
You wouldn’t be loyal to someone you don’t trust, and in the same way, a customer will not stay loyal to your brand if you are connected to objectionable activities or reports of your goods being sold out of suitcases in dark alleys.
While continuity in packaging is important for engaging with loyal customers and to ensure your product is easily recognizable, steps must also be taken in packaging design to ensure that your brand is incorruptible and protected against counterfeiting and tampering instances that could leach at your brand’s reputation.
With a global counterfeit market that is worth nearly $545 billion annually, it is important to protect your product and your brand from mass counterfeiting.
But remember, packaging continuity changes should be situational.
Conversely, if your brand is struggling to connect to your customers, or your brand reputation is failing, then blind uniformity is probably your worst enemy.
While being the prettiest piece of packaging at the ball is all well and good, brands need to keep an eye on the serious stuff such as anti-counterfeiting and tamper evidence. Above being recognizable, protecting your customers should be priority Numero Uno. Make your customers feel protected and cared for and they shall return the favor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Julie Ward is business development manager, Medica Packaging, part of Benson Group.