Tips to Creating a Winning Packaging Design for Your Product

By Tate Sherman

While some may consider packaging design to be a necessity, it’s really an opportunity to build brand equity. Here are some key elements to creating an effective packaging design:

Intelligent Aesthetics: Every aesthetic decision must have a specific logic to it. In other words, making something beautiful just for the sake of beauty is not a good strategy when it comes to packaging design. Your packaging design should be a seamless extension of your initial branding work. Your brand story, brand positioning, brand personality, and existing and future brand assets should all be accounted for when creating your packaging design.

Information Hierarchy: Establishing what your consumers need to know first and foremost is a crucial step in creating an effective packaging design. You only have a matter of seconds to engage a consumer, if you’re lucky, so clearly explaining what your product is, what sets it apart, and why a consumer should purchase it as quickly as possible will be a key element to your success.

Good Content: Make sure that your packaging content is compelling, informative, and consistent. Many clients, especially startups, are understandably hesitant to push the envelope, even a little bit, when it comes to content; they’d rather play it safe rather than risk alienating anyone. Sometimes, however, the greatest risk is not taking one at all, so one way or another, you should make sure that your packaging design offers engaging content – whether that’s your brand story or your brand personality.

In addition to engaging consumers your packaging design should also inform. It should clearly and succinctly explain your Unique Selling Proposition and Brand Differentiator. Lastly, your packaging design content should be consistent with your other brand assets. If you succeed in directing a consumer to your website, for example, that consumer should be reinforced by the consistency of your brand story, whereas a departure might cause confusion and diminish brand momentum.

Spend Wisely: The more you spend on packaging design the nicer it should be. An unnecessarily expensive packaging design, however, could have a negative impact on your overall business. This most often comes down to material and structure selection.

A custom structural packaging design is excellent, when you can afford it; however, it’s more than possible to create eye-catching, award-winning packaging designs with stock structures. The same goes for material selection. If you can afford the best, that’s great -- if you can’t, you shouldn’t overextend yourself; a cost-effective packaging design solution is always possible.

The flip side to this is also true: cutting spending at every corner can result in unremarkable packaging design, no matter how remarkable the designs are. So if it’s within your ability, and your packaging design agency is pushing for it, spend that extra 15 cents on a packaging for the right material. It’ll be worth it in the end.

Listen to the Experts: Startups in particular have a difficult time looking at the packaging design process objectively. The business is their baby, and they want to make sure their vision is realized. While their vision will guide the packaging design process, clients should keep an open mind to the vision of their packaging design agency.

If your agency disagrees with you and lets you know it, it’s because they care. A lazy agency will give you whatever you want, whether it makes sense or not, to get you out the door. So listen when they talk -- it’s because your packaging design agency wants you to succeed.

Be Logistical and Practical: Effective packaging design has to pay attention to logistical and practical concerns. Shelf space is a good example. Every retailer has a limited amount of shelf space for which many products are always competing. Once you make it onto a shelf, you probably won’t have much room. Therefore stackability is very important. You want to make sure that your packaging design not only allows for maximization of shelf space (fitting in as many products as possible), but also won’t fall down every time a person touches it. Something as simple as that could frustrate the retailer and result in a one-time order.

Differentiation: Dramatically standing out on a shelf isn’t always a good thing. For example, the packaging design for bath products are often clean and white to reflect the nature of the product. And while a dirty-looking packaging design for body soap might stand out on the shelf, it probably wouldn’t create the desired impression on a consumer. With that said, there is always room and opportunity for strategic differentiation.

Avoid Information Overload: Your product has a lot to offer: a unique selling proposition, exciting features, a compelling story, and more. So it’s understandable that brands want to fit in as much of that information as possible. As a general rule, though, the more information included in a given packaging design the less likely the consumer is to engage it. Consumers have extremely limited attention spans, and the first sign that these are going to be tested may frighten them away.

Therefore it’s necessary for brands to limit how much information they include in the packaging design -- but all is not lost. Think of your packaging design as the first clue in a treasure hunt, the ultimate treasure being your brand. Your packaging design will lead consumers to your website, your website will lead them to press about you, and so on. At each step of this process you can include new and exciting information.