Disrupting Your Branding & Product Packaging Design: Are you ready?
Following years of development and shelf time, it’s inevitable that your products start becoming a little stale in the face of consumers.
With an overabundance of products and different brand packaging suffocating markets nowadays, it’s important to add some much needed ‘disruption’ into your marketing mix.
An important question to ask is: Does your product packaging help your brand grow the way it should be?
Brand disruption begins with the right questions
What needs to be analysed and assessed if a business is serious about a brand design disruption strategy?
The best place to start is to evaluate your competitors and their adaption movements, studying their business branding approach for relevant ideas.
What are they doing that you aren’t? How do we go above and beyond the way they present their product packaging on the shelves?
Leadership Guru John C. Maxwell says: “If you want to be successful and reach your leadership potential, you need to embrace asking questions as a lifestyle.”
This means the act of simply questioning your current strategies propels your brand in the right direction, regardless of their initial accuracy – it’s the intent to want to change and adapt that matters.
What you’ve known to perhaps work in the past must be relinquished while onboarding a willingness to devise new strategies based on smarter questions.
Why is your brand’s growth dwindling?
This Ipsos article makes some great points regarding the effectiveness of how box packaging design and food packaging design influences the way consumers purchase goods. Plastic packaging is starting to be phased out and may be a factor affecting your sales and appeal towards younger consumers.
This article (Medium.com.) also shows us how the actual packaging design itself as well as brand logo design including labels, colours, patterns and imagery, can influence customer perception.
Industry expert Adam Ferrier once famously talked about the primary role of advertising and how its purpose was to change people’s behaviour in one of two ways – by increasing people’s motivation and desire for the brand or making it easier to buy or become more available.
Pressures from the Copycats: How to rise above them
How to tackle the increasing threat of private label and copycat brands is one of the most significant and brand-defining questions facing every branding agency today.
This constant ease of market penetration and product adjustment forces both brands and their advertising specialists to deal with a number of pressures likely to worsen every year including:
- Management of internal politics, ever changing expectations, pressure from global investors and moving goal posts.
- Increased staff turn-over rates.
- Increased budget pressure and corporate culture instability.
- New marketing managers making their own best interests the priority instead of promoting and funding innovation.
All of these factors create brand pressure and instability within a company. The end result is often a costly, reactive response to both the market and internal forces.
The golden question: How can you disrupt your category by:
- a) increasing consumers’ motivation and desire for your brand and its product packaging and
- b) making it easier for them to buy through improved availability?
A thought to ponder: Just for a moment, consider all the questions you consistently ask yourself and others about your business and your brand. Aren’t they basically the same questions you were asking last year, and the year before?
Business Branding Strategy – The road back to the top
For small business brands to remain successful and sustainable in the face of increased private label competition, a three to five year evolutionary strategic growth plan is basically inevitable.
This sort of approach ensures brands and their product packaging stay relevant regardless of market and trend shifts or what they’re competitors’ next move is.
It’s also considered a ‘journey-orientated’ marketing model. This is designed to take existing and current consumer audiences on a trek through time, bringing with them their emotional connection and loyal reasoning for buying a specific product.
This journey is formulated by design and packaging branding agencies that will:
- Keep them one step ahead of all the competition and keeps the brand relevant.
- Attract and acquire new consumers continuously.
- Allow them to better operate and adapt to market trends and regulatory changes.
- Ultimately generate consistent revenue growth.
Getting on the front foot before external elements begin to force you into reactive product packaging measures is the key to saving money, time and the hassle involved with ‘no option’ changes later on.
Reducing prices leads to sales. But are there other ways?
Asking the difficult questions can be a real challenge while searching for answers to incorporate into a new product packaging design strategy.
Whilst a few disruptive brands have shown exponential growth in recent times, the growth of well-established brands is generally not as successful by comparison.
The 2014-2017 Kantar Millward Brown’s analysis, How Disruption Can Fuel Brand Growth reveals that an evaluation of 2,000 brands measured in the BrandZ™ global database found that only around 10% of brands actually achieved a growth increase within this three-year period.
Simply by changing the way a brand communicates allows consumers to view the brand with fresh eyes unlocking new growth potential.
The key is to learn from already disruptive brands combined with consulting a packaging branding agency to redesign your product’s ventures by creating new opportunities amidst your own marketing mix.
Adding Disruption: What can be done?
What specifically can brands do to change their communication methods with their existing and potential customers?
Whilst hiring a design agency in Sydney or branding agency in Brisbane for product innovation or range extension ideas seems the best solution, it’s not the only way to disrupt your category. Brands can disrupt their market or category through reshaping their audience’s perception by:
- Introducing a new product packaging design
- A distribution overhaul
- Strategic deviation – create and expose fresh, untapped value for customers
- Gaining notoriety for your exceptional customer service
- Changing or improving your communication and adaption strategy.
The first step is to understand that most established brands operate in a comfort zone. These brands prioritise being ‘comfortable’ and figuring out ways on continuing to remain profitable in this zone.
These organisations utilise practices which encourage a basic strategy of simply doing more of the same, leading to routine and inflexible budgeting. This is exactly the operational dysfunction you’ll want to steer clear from, limiting your creativity and innovation.
7 Crucial Questions to Determine Disruption Readiness
Marketing teams and branding agencies should be creating branding solutions for small business using this foundational mix of questions:
- Do we truly have the courage to do something different and meaningful? – While the numbers may consistently point to requiring a disruption strategy, rarely will brand marketers or small business owners actually take the steps to do something about it.
- Do we know specifically what needs to change? – Strategies must be built on goals. Determine where to start by conducting the necessary research.
- Do we know who values us and why? – There have been studies in the past to suggest that on average consumers pay up to 14% more for a brand they perceive to be ‘meaningfully different’.
- Would we be willing and capable of investing to achieve what we want? – Investing in a strategic and fresh idea and befitting the brand often disrupts the status quo of the category.
- If we did act, would we be willing and able to learn fast enough to identify opportunities and correct the course? – This is important as falling behind your competitors constantly is detrimental to packaging design in terms of relevance.
- Would we be willing and able to continuously improve the effectiveness of our marketing? – Designing for the right customers and determining what will be meaningful and significant to them are the keys to disruption.
- Can we tolerate such a risk to accomplish our business brand identity goals? – Established brands should never stop trying to identify the next big innovation, regardless of the risk. Without taking risk, your brand is likely to remain stagnant and will struggle to move forward alongside your competitors.
Contact the team at the Jam & Co branding agency in Sydney to learn more about how to disrupt your brand and product packaging design and update your business brand identity.
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