How to Overcome 4 Common Reactive Pressures that Force Packaging Updates
Giving your packaging design a complete makeover can put brand marketers on edge even at the best of times.
However, being compelled to update your product packaging based on reactive measures may force marketers to make difficult, brand altering decisions affecting how customers view businesses completely.
Let’s look at four reasons why companies will consider consulting a branding agency to update their packaging regardless of the current state of their respective consumer market.
Brand Marketers will typically only introduce a update to their food packaging design under four primary circumstances including:
- Where a particular packaging design fails to generate consumer interest over a significant time period – A dilemma most common amongst larger organisation with possibly an over-release of brands or lines. Oftentimes a ‘top-selling’ product will become the main focus while poorly performing, outdated products fall by the wayside.
- Following a major competitor’s recent packaging design overhaul – A reactive trigger with incredibly influential power forcing marketers to produce a packaging strategy to compete with another’s shelf appeal and to match consumer attractiveness. Their new product packaging design may also be making claims that apply to your product as well. Staying relevant is key, and this is a race you don’t want to be left behind in.
- When the retailer selling your products gives a brand a packaging-related ultimatum – Australian retailers have had the upper hand regarding bargaining power and what products they choose to range-in to their shelves. This can create enormous pressure for a brand to switch up their packaging design tactics forcing them to put their entire business brand identity on the line.
- When your packaging costs are no longer viable – Sometimes a cost reduction strategy is inevitable for a certain product line to remain feasible. Brands will need to determine ways to keep a product and its packaging design cost-effective without sacrificing quality or its original allure-factor.
Responding with Short-term Solutions Rather Than Strategies
These are the top four pressures resulting in forced and sometimes hasty, ill-designed product packaging updates that have the potential to either make or break a brand.
The most important element of changing a product packaging design is to plan and strategise for the long haul. Short term ‘fixes’ lead brands down what is essentially a path of ‘no return’. This means implementing short-term re-purposing solutions traps brands in an indefinite cycle of playing market catch-up.
To ensure your products avoid the follower’s cycle, your marketing teams should be strategising for future market leadership by researching, analysing and evaluating:
- The current market trends
- Future direction of the market
- What your particular customers want from a product like yours
- If your brand is still relevant and whether or not it effectively appeals to your audience
- How both existing and new customers perceive and place your brand in comparison to your competitors
- The quality of your product’s emotional connectivity and added value
- The experience and user-friendliness of your product packaging design
- How your product has evolved over time determining how much of its influence is packaging related
- Your next market move to stay ahead of the pack!
The Importance of Staying on Top
To remain a relatively worthy competitor amidst a modern market, brands are constantly being encouraged to consult packaging branding agencies and other experts in attempt to keep them fiercely aligned in the market.
A professional creative design agency in Brisbane can help with branding solutions for small business ensuring you’re attracting new customers to your brand through improved packaging strategy.
You’ll need to either develop or enhance your reward system associated with particular products, providing reasons for customers to remain loyal, emotionally invested and possess a genuine desire for your product only moving forward.
Establishing an Evolutionary Strategic Brand Plan is generally the most effective way to accomplish this.
The Evolutionary Strategic Brand Plan: Explained
What exactly is an Evolutionary Strategic Brand Plan?
Put simply, it’s a strategic business branding plan designed to intrigue, fascinate and attract new consumers based on predictive measures relating to the possible directions of the current market.
Your strategy should also include a plan to generate a large customer base without alienating or losing existing customers. A three-five year period is what you’ll need your strategy to ultimately reflect.
Brand Planning: Future Adaption
Brand strategy plans have to be functional, inspirational and be capable of bringing something new to an already densely packed market.
Your Evolutionary Strategic Brand Plan needs to be extremely effective, developing it into a force beyond nature that entices customers to follow your product’s intended directions.
A branding agency in Brisbane can assist with edits as small as brand logo design or as significant as total re-packaging concepts.
An effective plan must include the aspirations of its ideal target audience whilst remaining relevant to its customers. This can prove challenging as markets are known to move swiftly alongside the course of technology advancement.
This type of plan looks at creating a pathway between consumers and the business ensuring connections, ideologies and relevant interests are all in sync for successful customer retention.
The most vital question to incorporate into your future branding strategy is: Why?
Why will customers want to follow and interact with my product/brand in the future?
Things to consider during this strategy development include gaining a thorough understanding of:
- The key market growth drivers
- Current and potential future inhibitors
- Risks to be avoided, and
- Benefits or advantages to be leveraged
Final Thought
While your brand and product packaging can be updated effectively by an experience brand marketer, a brand is ultimately created in the minds of consumers.
Listening to both to the data and the consumer and building on your strengths is your best play when planning to undergo substantial brand packaging makeovers in conjunction with your evolutionary strategy.
Get in touch with the team at the Jam & Co branding agency in Sydney for comprehensive advice and relevant solutions to your brand packaging or visit our Blog page for our other recent articles.
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