The art of food packaging: How to convince customers to choose your product
Getting your product to market can be an epic journey. To be successful you’ll need to have a great product, understand your market, and get your packaging to do some of the selling. Most of all you’ll need to understand your USP (unique selling point). Unless you have a totally unique, new food product, what makes your product different from your competitors?
The style and design of your food packaging is a big part of your marketing and will help to convince potential customers to buy your product. It also makes a statement about your company or your brand.
If you are new to the world of food packaging, it’s well worth seeking the advice of an expert food packaging company, such as The Bag Broker. They have the expertise to guide you through the process of finding a perfect packaging solution for your products.
7 things you need to consider before choosing a packaging design
There are a number of things you need to consider before running ahead with yourself and coming up with a design for the packaging of your product. Get these steps wrong and your beautifully designed packaging may not have the impact you were expecting.
1. Know your market
The most important consideration before attempting to design packaging is in understanding your target market. What group of people are going to buy your food product? What is the age, gender, education, occupation, income level and household type that will typically buy your product?
Simple packaging with low-key labels satisfying food labelling regulations may be appropriate for traditional, everyday food to be sold at a roadside stand or local grocery store, but artisan foods to be sold in an upscale specialty shop in an affluent area will need a much more colourful and fancy package design.
2. Where will you sell your product?
Where will you be selling your product? Is location or area important? Will you be selling your product in a grocery store, a speciality shop, to restaurants, at a roadside stall or at a farmer’s market? Will you be selling your product online? If so you will need to select suitable packaging to offer protection and minimise spoilage.
3. What is your marketing strategy?
Your marketing strategy centres on your target market, where you will sell your product, price, and how your customers will benefit from buying your product. You should have these goals clearly set out before you get started on designing packaging. Your marketing strategy should inform your packaging style decisions.
4. What are the regulations repackaging for your food product?
Design choices when it comes to packaging your product will depend on the food regulations in place for your particular food product. What type of packaging do you need and what information will you need to display on your packaging? You may need to include allergy and intolerance information. Labelling of gluten-free foods, for example, is an important issue. Around 1 per cent of the UK population have Coeliac Disease, an autoimmune condition involving an intolerance to gluten. Nut allergies are another serious consideration.
Specialised labels can be quite expensive, so this may also be a factor to take on board before making decisions about packaging.
5. Which side of your product is customer-facing?
How your product stands on the shelf should inform where your key messages are. Will your product be in trays, or unpacked by staff and put on to a shelf by hand? This is an important fact to consider. The front of your packaging may not be the first thing your potential customer sees.
6. What is your most important message
What you say on your packaging is important. What order you say your marketing lingo in also matters hugely. You want your potential customers to know what is most important about your product at a cursory glance. The 3 key things your customers will want to know are:
- What is it?
- What brand is it?
- What is in it?
You want your product packaging to be eye-catching and informative.
7. Don’t overcrowd
When you are bringing a new product to market, it’s easy to get over-excited and tempting to pack everything there is to know about your product on the packaging. You are so passionate about all the great things inside, it’s understandable you want to relay that to your target audience. However, too much information is definitely in most cases a bad thing. Overloading your packaging with information will lead to confusion. Keep it clean and simple with links to Facebook and Twitter, and where to find more information, such as recipes etc on your website.
