Navigating the Role of Creativity in Packaging and Display Strategies

Effective product packaging and displays can make or break your brand. Unfortunately, it’s easy to overlook and undervalue packaging because we focus on marketing what’s inside the box.

This can be a costly mistake: One national Paper and Packaging Board study reveals that nearly three-quarters of consumers are influenced by packaging design.

The takeaway for marketers? If you’re not paying enough attention to your packaging, you may miss out on a major opportunity to connect with customers.

Enter creative services for product packaging and display.

While many people think of packaging in terms of its primary function of safeguarding its contents, packaging’s potential is about much more than that. From boosting brand identity to creating more satisfying consumer experiences, creative services are critical to helping brands maximize the potential of their product packaging and displays.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at critical services' vital role in packing and display strategies from conceptualization through in-store execution.

The Art of Conceptualization

When it comes to branding, a simple box is anything but simple. Many elements go into conceptualizing packaging that ventures beyond mere protection to the “big picture” purpose of growing your brand. 

A few essential parts of the process include:

• Understanding and fulfilling your customers’ wants and needs (more on this later)
• Meeting your industry’s and products’ functional and shipping requirements
• Ensuring that your packaging is useful, valuable, and memorable

Some questions to guide you through the packaging conceptualization phase include:

• How does your product differ from the competition, and how can your packaging convey and highlight this? 
• How will your packaging resonate with your current customers and also build out your supply chain by attracting and engaging new ones? 
• How will your product help customers or fulfill their needs? The more you know how and why customers use your products, the better you can match your product with equally purposeful packaging.

Persona Research for Targeted Branding

Knowing your customer is a pivotal part of packaging and display conceptualization.  After all, if you don’t understand your customers, how can you understand what they’re looking for in your products and brand? 

Furthermore, how can you ensure that your product packaging and displays will also align with the wants and needs of the target audience for your brand?

That’s where persona research and buyer personas come in. 

Using market  research, brands can create and refine buyer personas that meticulously capture key data points for their target audience's different types of buyers. These include demographics, buying behaviors, pain points, and motivations. 

Another way of looking at it? Buyer personas shift the conversation from the abstract to real life. 

Just as buyer personas help you understand what to emphasize when creating and marketing different aspects of your products and brands, they can also help you create the best packaging for delivering effective marketing and sales messages. 

One of the best ways to use buyer personas when designing product packaging is to look at your existing data to determine what packaging has typically resonated with your customers. You can glean insights from social media, product reviews, customer satisfaction surveys, and other feedback channels to better understand what your customers like and dislike.  

Branding Beyond Aesthetics

While creating attractive and engaging packaging is a brand imperative, aesthetically pleasing design is just the start. Savvy marketers will also consider how to make packaging more engaging, memorable, and useful. 

Even something as seemingly simple as your packaging’s color scheme can have powerful potential. For example, certain colors convey feelings and compel action. In addition to choosing colors associated with your brand, you can use color to drive buyer behaviors. 

For example, research indicates that incorporating the color red encourages impulse buys, while navy blue leads to more mindful purchasing decisions. 

In addition to prompting customers to pluck your product from a crowded shelf, thoughtful packaging can also improve your brand image and identity to ensure you remain front-of-mind with your target customers. 

Innovative Packaging and Display Solutions

The success of your packaging also comes down to innovation. In the fast-moving marketing world, sticking with the same approaches over and over again can prevent you from falling beyond your competitors. 

On the other hand, embracing new and exciting advancements and technologies in your packaging—such as QR codes and other omnichannel marketing strategies, 3D-printed packaging, and water-based inks and adhesives can help you make a favorable impression on consumers. 

Speaking of sustainable alternatives to solvent-based materials, you need to prioritize sustainability as part of your creative product packaging in 2024, given the increasing prevalence of data pointing to consumer preferences for sustainable packaging.  

Finally, while creativity can help you stand out in the crowded marketplace, so can knowing what the competition is up to. In some cases, you may be able to adapt what’s working for them to your products and brands. In other cases, you may decide to go in the opposite direction with your packaging strategies for differentiation. 

Bay Cities: Elevating Brands Through Creativity 

As leaders in the packaging and display industry, the Bay Cities team is keenly aware of the importance of creativity in achieving the most effective packaging and retail displays. 

From onset through in-store executions like endcaps and retail display trains, our creative services experts will work with you to design and execute strategic packaging based on your brand, goals, and target customers. 

To learn more about how Bay Cities can help you reach your goals through creative and strategic packaging design, contact us today.