When designing packaging, it’s easy to get carried away with the creative. It’s an involved process, and you can occasionally forget who you’re really designing for.
We all have personal tastes when it comes to what we think looks good and what we’d like to see on the shelf. We all have that creative itch to scratch, and we all want to produce designs our peers adore.
So it’s easy to get sucked into the on-shelf beauty parade, competing to have the design that is the most aesthetically pleasing, the most creative or the most disruptive. The problem is that it clouds our view of the most important person in the entire design process: the end consumer.
Shoppers spend about three seconds deciding which product they’re going to put into their baskets. In that time, brands need to communicate the answers to three questions: what is it, what does it do, and why do I need it?
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Of course there are shortcuts to these three questions. If you are looking at the yogurt fixture, chances are you know what the product is and what it does already. Context is half the battle, but making assumptions and breaching too many of the category norms just to be clever can be risky.
That’s the harsh reality of the shelf. If your packaging is confusing or vague and doesn’t answer these questions, then it hasn’t been designed for the consumer. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is – people aren’t going to buy it if they don’t understand it.
Get Out of the Studio
We all bring personal bias to the table, especially when we know a category well. I have spent many years working on pet care brands and I’m a pet owner myself, but I have to be mindful of making leaps and assumptions. Just because something appeals to me doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone else.
This is why it is so crucial to identify the real and most valuable target audience in any project, and to keep them in mind throughout.
Strangely enough, it’s sometimes easier to stand in the consumer’s shoes when you are working in a category you don’t buy. Years ago, I asked a (male) brand manager in sanitary care if he found it hard to develop the products and their communications. I was unclear as to how he could relate to the user.
But he simply said: “I research it properly. I listen, I speak to the users, I don’t make assumptions because I can’t.” His need to always consult the consumer meant that they were top of mind constantly and he was never in danger of ignoring them.
And that’s exactly it.
To craft effective packaging, designers should research their target customer extensively. Desk research can help with that, but it’s no good sitting behind a Mac looking at what’s pretty online. To truly get to know your consumer, you have to fully immerse yourself in their world.
We are currently working with Ringtons , a doorstep delivery service with a mostly elderly customer base in the North East of the UK. Before we started the project we sought out the customers, learned what mattered to them and saw firsthand how they interacted with the products.
We found things we’d never have picked up from a desk: people struggling to tell one product from another because the navigation wasn’t obvious, finding the text hard to read or packs awkward to open. Those small details enabled us to create new packaging that was not only attractive but made the product easier to use and understand.
None of this is rocket science. It’s common sense that you need to understand the buyer of a product before you design for them. But plenty of designers do get carried away.
Packaging is Not the Final Stage
As a final point, packaging design shouldn’t be the final flourish at the end of the brand process. It needs to be connected to the wider brand strategy, to the business objectives, so designers should be involved right at the start of a project.
In FMCG, your packs have to work hard. They are a window into your brand. If you have a full comms plan, TV and six-sheets, but your pack doesn’t do the job on shelf, you are dropping your consumers at the last hurdle.
Consumers don’t see brands in isolation, and yes, they are bombarded with messages. But at the end of the day this isn’t about what other designers think. It’s not about award juries. It’s about whether your customer sees the product, understands it and wants it in their life.
Great design doesn’t just look good. It works hard. It gets products into baskets. If it doesn’t do that, what’s the point?
Jess Kaye is the Business Director of CHILLI, the specialist design and packaging team within IMA. She is responsible for running the CHILLI division, working primarily with household retail brands on everything from insight and strategy through to brand creation, development and revolution. After cutting her teeth in-house at Britvic, Kaye has worked with some of the best at Nestle, Mars and Taylors of Harrogate. Her strength in branding and extensive comms experience saw her move to an agency growth role, championing FMCG. Taking the reins at CHILLI was the natural next step. She is now growing a talented and specialist design team within IMA in what she believes is the best of both worlds – a focused specialist team with the support of wider integrated resources at IMA.
