The Ideal Product Packaging Strategy

If you want to achieve maximum efficiency in your production and packaging strategy, it is not enough to operate with a daily tactical mindset. This short-term mindset will only work if it helps you complete your daily tasks and achieve your project objectives. However, a much more proactive approach is needed to achieve long-term organisational success and obtain efficiency that has a lasting impact on your bottom line and sales growth.

Developing a packaging strategy is a fundamental step towards aligning with high-level business objectives and making the most of every penny spent and every amount of time invested in the packaging process.

Why is a packaging strategy important?
As an internal department operating to support the objectives and expectations of the wider organisation, functioning without a strategy aligned with management objectives is a recipe for failure. You need to understand how your actions and operations influence the overall success of the business. For example, an organisation that makes sustainability a top priority requires its packaging department to develop systems that take into account the environmental impact of the packaging development process.

Developing a packaging strategy is not a simple task. It must encompass several objectives that the management team may establish. Redesigning packaging for marketing purposes is an important responsibility. Sustainability, efficiency and cost-effectiveness are just some of the key areas of interest for many companies. But how do you create a strategy that incorporates multiple complex objectives?

Basic steps in developing a packaging strategy
The beginning of any strategic development process is the discovery phase. Time must be invested in becoming familiar with the team and the overall objectives. Many companies have a highly prominent sustainability mission and expect this ideology to be implemented throughout the organisation. At this stage, it is also important to understand the individual objectives of the stakeholders. Each department within the organisation will interpret the objectives differently. A complete understanding of these objectives creates alignment and determines what you will need to do to fulfil the mission.

Next, you should spend time learning as much as possible about the current and future state of your production and how it can operate most effectively. Industry analysis is a particularly important step because it helps you plan for more than the present. The best strategy takes the future of the company and the industry into account.

Once you have gathered information about the industry, organisational objectives and other motivating factors, you need to have a complete and detailed understanding of your business’s overall position. Only then can you move forward to determine how each objective influences the functions of the packaging department and operations, including:

Safety
Risks to consumers and production personnel;

Functionality
Technology and design for achieving objectives; for example, maintaining freshness throughout the shelf life, and ensuring that packages are easy to open, close and dispose of;

Packaging differentiation
The extent to which your packaging must be differentiated from competing packaging;

Promotion
The extent to which your packaging is promoted in the media;

Brand reinforcement
The importance of brand recognition through packaging, by means of shape or colour;

Communication
The message that your packaging must communicate to consumers;

Protection
The packaging you put on the market must protect the product throughout the supply chain, maintaining product presentation and longevity in the different environments it will encounter on its way to the consumer and beyond;

Budget
Maintaining the budget in every department involved in the product line is important! Understand the costs of packaging materials and the total production cost for each finished product, as well as the expected profitability of each campaign, promotion and initiative.

The way each of these objectives affects the operation of the packaging unit will help you identify a basic strategy. Systematically, you have corporate objectives arising from industry forces, and you establish your own departmental objectives. Those objectives then shape the objectives for each packaging function.

Creating a packaging strategy to help build your brand
Once you have established your overall packaging strategy, you should spend more time considering how you can effectively build your brand’s growth. After all, packaging design goes a long way towards determining whether or not a product is marketable.

Regardless of the product category—beverage, perfume, clothing, laundry detergent or toilet paper—successful packaging design depends on its ability to connect emotionally with the consumer. While advertising begins the “conversation” with consumers, 80% of purchasing decisions are made at the shelf. Product presentation is the only form of marketing that 100% of your customers have seen. They have seen the packaging, picked up the product and placed it in their shopping baskets. How can you make sure that you capture shoppers’ attention and retain it over time?

The answer relates to the marketability of the packaging: how effectively it attracts the attention of the target consumer and connects with them on an emotional level.
Based on the essential design characteristics of commercial packaging, your design should:

Be simple and focused;
Have a clear hierarchy of brand messages;
Highlight product differentiators or new benefits/features;
Make the most of colour, shape, images and words.
Strategic packaging is effective packaging
Excellent results and lasting success are almost always the result of planning and strategy. Investing in research and communication throughout the company will significantly increase the likelihood of your success.

Most importantly, your business will make significant progress because your department has used general goals to shape its own objectives. And because you conducted your research, you were able to focus on the details of the plan and execute it perfectly.