Sellers face stiff competition in online and offline stores. It's not enough to market a good product alone, and if you want to be one step ahead of the competition, your product should have a standout graphic design packaging. But why should you have a packaging design, and why is it important?
Why is Product Packaging Important?
Product packaging is one way to showcase and market your brand. It’s one signal to say that “we’re also here” and that you have something to put up against your competitors. This allows your target market to consider your products as well.
Another reason why product packaging is important is enhanced brand recognition. Through branding, you can get creative with how your packaging appears, and it will help your customers remember your business. Eventually, they might end up buying more of your products if they find them memorable and useful to their lives.
Plus, if you think about it, product packaging can protect your items too. You want to ensure that the items get from one place to another and in one piece. And that’s why you need to put your products in suitable packaging. Finally, you’ll notice how unboxing videos on YouTube could easily go viral online. That’s because product packaging is part of the buying experience.
Elements of Great Product Packaging
- Logo
- Colors
- Typography
- Copy
- Visuals (i.e., iconography, illustrations)
- Form
Steps to Create a Graphic Design Packaging
Step 1: Understand and Integrate Your Brand Into Packaging
The first step to making graphic design packaging is to understand your brand first. Here are some questions to consider:
- How do you want your brand translated to your packaging?
- How do you want your brand remembered?
- How do you want your packaging to be different from your competitors?
Plus, when you’re building a brand, you want to ensure that all your branding details are finalized as well, such as:
- Logo
- Fonts
- Colors
- Iconography or illustrations
If you have these ready, you can move forward to the next step.
Step 2: Remember Your Competitors
Part of graphic design packaging is looking at the packaging of your competitors’ products. What makes them sellable? How do they catch your target market’s attention? After all, you want more people to buy your items from the shelves. Knowing what your competitor has done can give you an advantage in designing your packaging better.
Step 3: Identify Your Customer Base
Once you have figured out your brand, it's time to learn about your audience. Who are you marketing this to, and who are the people you expect to use your products? You should always have these questions in mind at all times. If you know your customers well, you can decide which fonts and colors to appeal to your customer base.
Step 4: Know and Choose the Right Packaging Material
Packaging comes in different forms. For example, if you're selling soap, you want to ensure that the box or packaging is just right. It's not too big nor too compact. Once you select the packaging for your product, make sure to have a dieline that designers will rely on. This way, it won’t look messy in any way, and all design elements are accounted for once it’s ready to print.
Step 5: Conceptualize Different Design Ideas
You will not land on the best design immediately. It will take different design iterations for your product packaging to click. That’s why with graphic design packaging, you will need to test out your designs to a test audience. Expect to get stuck at this step before your product fully makes it to market. There are several things for consideration here:
- Design structure - something you want to present to the audience once they see your products on the shelves
- Versatility
- Functionality
- Reusability
Step 6: Ready Your Printer
You might think, why should I have the packaging printed before getting feedback? Sure, your designer may show a mockup of your packaging. But a printed version of your packaging should be ready to show for you and your test audience to use.
Step 7: Review Your Design
If your product packaging design is fresh from the printer, you should be the first to evaluate the design. See if there were some elements out of place. Do you think the logo should be placed somewhere else? Is a label included? What else is missing? What can be taken out? These are some questions for you to consider before you show it to a test audience. This way, your designer can revise your packaging design and print it once again.
Step 8: Get Feedback on Your Designs
Before making the final decision on your packaging design, you need feedback from others, specifically your colleagues and test audiences. You need different sets of fresh eyes to review the design. This step is crucial before your packaging design finally makes it to the shelves. Ensure that you listen to their feedback, but you don’t have to put everything in there. Include feedback that would have a significant impact on your final product packaging design. Also, create packaging iterations that are reasonable enough to make your brand stand out from the shelf.
Step 9: Finalize Your Graphic Design Packaging
If you have all the feedback from your test audience considered, it’s time to print it and check for any errors. Is everything all set? Based on the feedback given, do you think you still have your branding intact there as well? With this in mind, you can launch your products and be prepared for people to see and buy them in stores.
Step 10: Launch It and Continue Receiving Feedback
Once you launch your product to the market, the design work doesn’t stop. Once people buy your products, ask for and read their reviews and see if they mentioned anything about your packaging design. After all, you want to be one step ahead of the competition, and the best way to one-up them is to improve your designs. This way, your target audience is inclined to buy from you and not your competition.
Conclusion
For product sellers, product packaging is another aspect of branding. It could take time to land on a graphic design packaging that would suit your customer base. But all the hard work you pour into creating a custom packaging design will be worth it. In the end, you want product packaging that’s functional, useful, and memorable to your customers.
