The Complete Guide To Product Packaging Design.

Did you know that what our industry considers some of the “best packaging designs” perform terribly on retail shelves? Winning awards for attractive packaging means nothing if your product does not concretely lead to higher sales. To be blunt, your product packaging design generates reorders or retailer returns.

Do you want to know how to create the “best packaging design” that generates revenues and captures market share? Good, because that’s what we will cover. Keep reading to learn more about how to implement a packaging design process. In this article, you will learn:

• The elements that make up a best-selling design.
• How to design a brand strategy to support your product.
• The latest packaging design trends and how we feel about them.
• The role of package design testing for CPG and FMCG products.
• Things to consider as you create your initial conceptual designs.
• The SmashBrand packaging design process.

Throughout the article, you will see real-life examples of startups and category leaders who make better-than-good packaging design decisions. These designs contain elements that we believe positively impact consumer intent.

By the time you finish reading, you will have much to discuss with your packaging designer or have booked a time to talk with our packaging design experts.

The Traditional CPG Packaging Design Approach

The traditional design approach for CPG product packaging depends on the company’s size. Here’s a look at how consumer packaged goods brands typically look to solve their product design dilemma.

Small Business: Hire a graphic design specialist or agency to give your product a unique look.

Mid-Size Business: Hire an agency or leverage an internal creative team to create a packaging design that aligns with your brand image.

Enterprise: Hire a packaging design firm to support your internal team in creating a product design.

But even though these are the traditional approaches, there are better, more profitable ways to design packaging. Even a small startup with limited capital can create a brand development strategy, including a packaging design process, creating more than a cool-looking package. And you must because your brand will compete against the biggest companies in the most competitive categories.

A “good” look becomes a poor performer if the product next to yours has more of the following:

1. An emotional appeal because of your existing brand Resonance.
2. Better positioning thanks to current brand recall from products in other categories.
3. A product design that covers more ground with its brand differentiation.
4. More impactful purchase drivers to grab a consumer’s attention.

For product packaging to be successful (and your brand to stay in business), take advantage of any opportunity to enhance the performance of your product, especially when the product sits directly in front of a shopper.

The Reality of Packaging Design For FMCG Products

There is no greater competitive landscape than in the fast-moving consumer goods category. FMCG product packaging needs to understand this fact. There is a lack of loyalty in today’s distracted society, where consumers are omnichannel shopping for their basic needs.

Retail packaging for these products must assume that consumers have never seen or heard about their brand. While we want to carry over the brand elements that a consumer subliminally recognizes, we shouldn’t lean on their strength for shoppers to make repeat purchases.

Fast-moving consumer goods must continuously resonate with a shopper’s needs and desires. Packaging design for kid’s products needs to make the mom feel better about her parenting choices each time she shops at the store. If another company’s design does this better, expect to lose the sale.

Elements Of A Winning Design

There are three principal components of product packaging design that are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of brands execute a design that covers these three components. However, the best packaging designs combine all components to strengthen the package’s primary message.

The Packaging

A package’s visual shape and kinesthetic feel can be the difference between purchasing and placing the product back on the shelf. In a simple example, brands can decide to go with.

• Smooth vs. grainy feel.
• Flat vs. raised font.
• Wide vs. narrow mouth.

Unsurprisingly, the package is part of a consumer’s package experience. The most effective packaging designs embrace the idea that how a customer holds the product well determines its success.

Graphic Design

When hiring packaging designers, they must understand that each design element speaks words and feelings to the consumer. The color choices, angles, and fonts will all give meaning to the look.

Example: Market to generation-Z consumers with a playful, vibrant look that communicates health in a fun way.

Compelling Messages

Words matter, and most brands’ mistake is looking at product features exclusively through an internal company lens. Regarding product benefits, the language you and potential customers speak may differ. When considering your packaging design copy, maintaining a customer lens prevents subjectivity in the design process.

Designing A Brand Strategy

When a brand hires us for packaging design, they get a fresh look at their brand strategy. A brand’s overall structure and theme are affected when launching or redesigning a product. Therefore, a packaging design strategy looks at the product and brand inclusively and in isolation.

Let’s look at some of the essential aspects of a brand strategy and how it impacts your product packaging design.

Company Branding

Are you launching this product to increase or leverage brand awareness? Sometimes, a product may be more of a branding packaging design, where it’s about furthering the brand name. Often, this is the case when creating a branded house line extension.

Other times, your branding is less about existing and more about creating. Your brand elements have little impact on purchase intent, but you hope that repeat purchases will increase future brand visibility.

Competitive Landscape

The age of your category will, in most cases, indicate the level of competition your brand faces. A brand may create a product in an existing category to increase brand identity or look to be the early adopter in a new emerging category.

The wrong move adopted by brands in established categories is creating louder packaging designs, hoping to stand out. Turning the volume up on your product packaging is not a strategic move. It’s an obvious choice that only in leads to capturing market share in certain situations.

Buyer Persona

Hopefully, your brand understands its customer archetype, which is the starting point for learning about your ideal consumer’s hopes, fears, interests, and desires. On a product level, you need to understand who is buying this product at a deeper level. Agreement between the consumer and the design elements is how you create shelf interest and prevent competitors from distracting shoppers away from your product.

Product Packaging Design Trends

Like music, clothing, and art, with time, product packaging trends come and go. Often, these trends repeat themselves. Awareness of these trends (and their lifecycle) a conversation to have with your team and the agency helping you design your product.

Here’s a look at the current trends and packaging inspiration from some of the most popular brands.

Sustainable Packaging

Sustainable packaging is both the use and mention of packaging that better impacts our planet. While the media discussion is about 10x greater than industry acceptance, brands continue to look at sustainability to stand out from the competition.

Custom Packaging

Gen-Z is all about personalization; even if the message is one-to-many, they still want the packaging to suit their needs. Custom packaging is one way to satisfy this customer demographic and create a better user experience. Whether using unique packaging material or providing a solution to a problem, every brand must have a conversation about how to stand out with custom packaging.

Functional Packaging

The definition of functional packaging depends on the product and the consumer demographic. Functional packaging serves to fit nicely into the lifestyle of the consumer. The starting point of creating functional packaging is to ask, how can I make this packaging easier to use now and over time?

Minimalist Packaging

Minimalist packaging design is a popular choice by digitally native companies. However, since DTC is dead for most FMCG products, the moment these concepts hit store shelves, they need a lifeline when performing against strategically designed products.

The benefit of minimalist packaging is creating white space for the right messages to shine, but you have a product that consumers won’t connect with without messaging.

Package Design Testing

While familiar with market research, only some brands know the need to test packaging for shelf performance. Unfortunately, when competing at the highest level, the majority need more than market research to guarantee success. Product package testing, where you measure against a real-life competitive landscape, gives you a clear understanding of your design’s impact.

Considerations For Your Product Packaging Design

Just because packaging fits your product and your buyer persona doesn’t mean it’s the best one for your brand. There are other company and retailer considerations before making our final packaging design. Here are a few questions to ask your team and agency about a design.

What is the risk that I will struggle with the supply chain?

Keeping products in stock is challenging enough, but when your packaging creates problems with production, you become a risk to retailers. Be sure to forecast the impact packaging has on the flow of your supply chain.

What is the lifespan of your product package design?

Industries, trends, and shoppers change and product package design lasts forever. So, how long can you expect this design to last, and how much of a change do you predict in the future?

Will you need secondary packaging?

Will your packaging design work for both inner packaging and outer packaging? As your brand grows, additional product placement opportunities will present themselves. Even if secondary packaging isn’t a part of your initial design, consider the future growth of your product and whether the design is transferrable to other types of packaging.

Do you have product & packaging alignment?

The saying “too good to be true” doesn’t exist without good reason. If your product looks significantly better than it tastes, customer experience will go in the tank. When you create your packaging design, make sure to retain a level of transparency in the flavor, sweetness, and texture of your product.

The SmashBrand Product Packaging Design Process

While we cannot give away our packaging design agency’s secret sauce, here’s a look at the categories, summarizing the 340+ steps in our packaging design process. Every brand should follow these steps before making a final design decision.

Brand Strategy & Market Research

In our packaging design process’s brand discovery phase, we discover insights about category dynamics, consumer perceptions, and competitive purchase drivers. Our team presents data to help guide the conversation.

• Consumer & retail immersion interviews to determine what’s working and what needs to change in future product packaging.
• Purchase driver’s research that puts the consumer at the forefront of strategic planning.
• A direct consumer study of over 600 targeted consumers to determine attitudes, preferences, and expectations about your product category.
• Perform in-store competitive market distinctive auditing that creates a visual roadmap uncovering opportunities to stand out.
• Purchase driver message research to develop messaging criteria that drive higher adoption and create substantial differentiation.
• Pack Speak™ consumer testing & scoring measures the effectiveness of different communication directions, purchase drivers, their priority, and the hierarchy of messaging themes. 
• Perform a style path expansive creative routes exploration, a broad exploration of creative packaging design directions. This discovery phase helps to identify a high-performing design.

Package Design Testing

With a detailed understanding of your brand, consumer demographic, and competitive landscape, it’s time to start designing and testing your product packaging. Each step in this process gets us closer to a design optimized for peak shelf performance.

• Initial screening with over 600 target consumers with various design concepts through our gut check testing-diagnostic feedback methodology.
• Packaging design system & structural concepts based on all research and learning up to this point. 
• Conduct distinctive assets & uniqueness scoring analysis against all competitors for each design element. 
• Begin our Preformance™ concept test & scoring process, which tests consumers randomized to eliminate pre-exposure bias found in traditional design research. 
• Continue with optimizing the packaging design system, where we test the top designs against one another to find the most important front panel messages and determine each placement.
• The final step is our Preformance™ purchase intent testing & scoring to give you accurate data to support your design. The result will give you and retailers confidence about your brand’s performance on the shelf.  

Final Concept Delivery

Our extensive testing has led us to a position where we can predict (without subjectivity) what performs best. No longer will you question whether you have the correct amount of white space, the right value propositions and whether you communicate them well. Our finished packaging design guarantees a high return on investment. 

Product Packaging Design Agency

From conception to the final design, SmashBrand is a strategic product packaging agency helping your brand outperform retail store competitors. Our methodology puts data before design,d so your finished look is guaranteed to win on-shelf. Book a time to discuss your project with our team.

Packaging Design Case Study