1. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE CONTAINER ITSELF AND PACKAGING?

The difference between the two is perspective — your own, as packaging creator or product owner, and your potential customer, which can be anyone who observes your product on shelves in real markets or internet stores. Here’s the point. The container is just a utility thing. It must be of high quality and preserve your product from any outside damage. Packaging is about messaging and how it delivers information to your customer, how you care about him and his experience with your product.

2. STORYTELLING

This is a popular thing in marketing regarding branding and using packaging to tell your story. Here you must note two things. Packaging is a good way to tell your story in a simple and effective way. You must be attentive to your story, its structure, inner message and abilities of your target audience to hear and perceive it. This can be a challenging task to clearly understand what you want to say. In most cases, you will need assistance of an experienced marketing team to improve, adapt and perfect the history you worked through. Packaging should act as a bridge to the consumer, where your product is a mirror of your professional life.

3. BRAND PROMISE

When it comes time for brand promises, packaging is the first thing your consumer comes in contact with. This is more than just being part of your brand story. The brand promise is a short clear answer to your consumer that offers solutions to his problems in 1 to 2 short sentences. This is the key to any successful packaging itself and should be the main goal of its message.

4. PRODUCT SENSE

Answer honestly to yourself: what is the main purpose of my business? Business is always a bit more than just money making. Money making is a result of your business’s communication. It is more of an instrument or even a display of your current result, but it shouldn’t be the sole purpose. Product sense is an inner feeling which determines why your product is here and what is its goal. This feeling is what happens between your product and customer when they make their first contact at the store shelves.

5. PACKAGING ITSELF

The whole philosophy may be useless if you forget about clever and thoughtful  implementation. This includes the purposes of your product, its needs and more. Products may be different. In one case, it’s a new line of natural milk. In another, it is a website and, oftentimes, products are supported with well-designed website. Every moment must be counted as important. You need to synchronize the packaging of your own product (including its style, materials, visuals etc.) with website design (every detail) and other products which come in contact your customer. You also must be very careful choosing new packaging material or reworking old.

Utility plus emotions. This is a very important point. History knows a lot of examples how skipping one of these moments ruined the whole market expansion of some old and popular trademarks. We can easily remember 1980s when Coca-Cola tried to go from classic Cola to New Coke. The reaction of loyal customers was so negative, that the more tasty and worked out New Coke faded away from stores shelves replaced by the old original product. The company management learned lessons from this situation and made a return to old original recipe and presented this as a way back to origins. After the initial drop in sales, Coca Cola returned its position in the market and very soon even improved sales for next 10 years, forcing rivals like Pepsi Cola to new rebranding.

This short list was created to help you understand the importance of packaging itself and a lot of details must be counted to make it successful. Think about it, and you may start planning your positioning through rebranding right now!