Packaging Design Ideas to Bolster Your Brand

Our culture is constantly evolving. For brands, that means they must create new ways to remain relevant while reflecting today's culture. In response, many brands are refreshing their packs more frequently than ever before. Most noticeably in the past four or five years, speed-to-market with a pack refresh appears to play a larger role in overall brand activity.

Advances in technology and social networking expose consumers to new things at a rapid pace—people expect some level of change all the time. Rather than keeping the same package around for years, or even decades, many brands are delicately balancing the need to maintain familiarity with the need to remain relevant.

This increased frequency of package refreshes brings the return on investment (ROI) into question. While ROI is difficult to measure as it relates to branding on pack, over time the cost of not refreshing can easily be more than the cost of redoing a package. Below are a few ideas that can help you get the most out of your brand package design.

Packaging shouldn't be a one-off project—Packaging plays a key role in defining your brand and driving relevance in this fast-paced market. Revitalizing a brand's packaging presents opportunities for new and established brands to break out of the clutter and let their identities shine. Many companies evaluate packaging only when their brand is languishing or when a new variant is about to launch. Don't think of refreshing your packaging as a project with an end date; instead, the "evolution of packaging" should be a regular conversation and strategic choice as your brand strategy evolves.

Make an emotional connection—Consumers today are looking to emotionally connect with their brands. Consumers are actively seeking new ways to explore the ideas they're already thinking about, and brands can play a role. Consumers appreciate diversity and discovery, and really embrace individuality. Consumers are experiential—tweeting, posting, sharing, and updating regularly. Can your brand include the consumer in the conversation, or better yet, let your consumer lead the conversation?

Ground your brand in its core—Redesigning a package requires brands to be very clear about their ownable equities (and those they wish to own) so they can remain consistent at the core and drive consumer relevance at the same time. Packaging structure and graphics go hand-in-hand and sometimes offer the only points of differentiation for a brand. Getting help from a branding or packaging firm can help identify and strengthen ownable equities. Whether this includes evolving your brandmark or just those equities that bring your products' benefits to life, partners can help you stay true to your brand's core while injecting fresh elements into it.

Keep it simple—Consumers are overloaded and don't have time to figure out your brand. If your package is too complicated, the consumer will move on in mere seconds. Simple ideas are best understood by consumers, especially when you don't have lots of marketing dollars to explain your big idea or the meaning behind your nomenclature. Start with crafting efficient and effective priorities of communication (POC). Brand teams often create briefs listing seven to ten (or more!) POCs for a tiny front label. Consumers get lost after three, so make sure you prioritize the most important aspects of your brand. You can share all of the other information on side or back labels—or better yet, in other media sources.

Real world applications

To bring to life how these concepts can be put into practice, consider how Landor has recently designed and refreshed the following packaging for our clients.

iD Gum: Creating a new brand. The chance to create a new brand in a new category is rare these days—it's like winning the lottery in the branding and packaging worlds. Creative teams love to imagine what-ifs and explore various scenarios that address consumer challenges. It's much easier to measure packaging ROI if you are creating a new-to-the-world brand or category. With new brands, you don't have years of a brand's life shaping consumer perceptions.

The concept behind the iD Gum packaging was to inspire teens to explore and discover new things through play. To incorporate this concept, a cellophane wrap with a patterned design that partially hides the artwork invites teens to take a look at what lies inside. The packaging facilitates interactivity between teens, their peers, the gum, the games, and ultimately the brand itself.

To encourage teens to expand their curiosity, Landor researched art by young artists from diverse backgrounds, artistic styles, and multiple techniques from countries such as Argentina, Maldives, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and United States and chose a select few emerging artists who embody the spirit of the brand.

Gevalia: Stretching a brand for new distribution. For a brand that has been around for well over a hundred years, a packaging refresh may seem like a daunting task. Gevalia needed to understand its ownable equities and Landor saw an opportunity to dig deep into the heritage of the brand to find visual territories that would bring the brand story to life.

Landor's team of designers explored various brand stories and pack design options. For Gevalia, the high quality of coffee was not in question, and its Swedish heritage was the springboard for the big idea. And from that nugget of history, the entire identity, look, tone, and feel of the brand was crafted.

Even the brand colors of yellow and blue came from the Swedish flag. Designers used imagery to evoke modern and traditional elements of Sweden and the source countries of the coffee beans. For example, French folk traditions are saluted on the graphic for French roast; Colombian coffee comes in a bag depicting a clay house, reflective of Colombian residences. Never before on the pack had the brand taken advantage of its heritage and rich coffee culture.

Sour Patch: Refreshing an iconic brand to remain relevant. Some brands do it to combat copycats, others refresh only when introducing a new variant. Sour Patch refreshed its package to avoid look-alikes and breathe new life into the brand. Before starting the project, the Landor team mined the brand's equities by identifying what was important to stakeholders and how it differentiated from the competition.

Landor helped strengthen the brand's ownable equities and created a new cast of Sour Patch characters. While still in the early stages of marketing, it appears that Sour Patch's graphic system will be compelling at shelf and draw consumers in during that first moment of truth.

ROI sense

Making the decision to either slightly refresh your package or do a major overhaul depends on the health of your brand. We often see brands that have been declining over the years, yet are hesitant to implement a packaging redesign. Today's brands need to continually advance forward to remain relevant. If you think of your brand's packaging as the living, breathing way in which your product is brought to life, then continually evolving your package makes ROI sense. pP

About the authors—Christine Hall is associate client director, and Dale Doyle, creative director in Landor Associates's Cincinnati office.