The Importance of Product Packaging

There are some who claim your packaging is the first impression a potential customer gets of your product. While that was certainly true once upon a time, it isn’t so much anymore. Now the first impression any customer is going to get of your brand will come from your online presence way more often than not. Does that mean that your packaging is unimportant and shouldn’t be carefully considered and made excellent? Absolutely not, good packaging is part of your overall brand image and packaging can stick in the minds of your customer base. You need a packaging that will suit your product, and most importantly of all, protect your product.

Why?

The reason you want strong packaging is because it sends the message that you care about every single detail of your products. When a customer sees packaging that shows you care about every aspect of your presentation they feel good about having purchased your product and in the future it may give them that little push to choose your products over a competitor in the future. Your packaging should also show that you care about the security of your product when you ship it out. If you send a product to a customer in a package that barely looks like it’s up to the task of protecting what you have shipped it will set off alarm bells for the customer if they are looking for something else that you sell. They will look back on shoddy packaging and go a different way for fear that their item will be damaged in transit. It is important that your packaging look great both aesthetically and functionally.

How?

So how do you create great packaging? It’s really not that hard. You literally just need to show that you put care into the packaging. The aesthetic should match your product. You shouldn’t ship out a socket wrench set meant for mechanics in rainbow unicorn packaging, for example. And you also shouldn’t go overboard with your packaging. A book doesn’t need to be sent with a bunch of bubble wrap. I have bought a lot of books in my lifetime, and none of them were broken on arrival. A few rips and tears once in a while, but books aren’t prone to shattering. Which is to say that your packaging should just match your product in aesthetic and function. You’ve already designed the product, it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to design packaging that matches.

Results

The results for great packaging will far outweigh the effort you put into creating the packaging. The functional part of packaging is largely a solved problem at this point, so you likely won’t need to do too much work to find the right packaging for your product. As far as aesthetic goes, even something as simple as slapping your logo and a bit of copy on the package will go a long way. You can also wrap the product in paper with your logo on it, if it is a product that wrapping in paper will fit. You can throw in a standard thank you note and a sticker with your logo on it and you’re good to go. These small things have wide reaching effects because customers remember these things.

Conclusion

Use good packaging. There’s really not much to conclude on this one, but I’m a writer, so this is going to be a full paragraph of my rambling anyway. Packaging may not be your first impression anymore like it once was, but it still serves as something of a formal introduction to your customer. The first impression will likely be your online presence, so the packaging is where you sell your brand to the customer. They have already bought the specific product, but you want to turn them into a fan of your brand. Return customers are crucial to your brand’s life. Make sure your brand is memorable.