Five Packaging Design Essentials for Wellness Brands
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The difference between a product customers are attracted to and one they are not hangs in the delicate balance of their individual beliefs, personal priorities, and visual preferences.
When it takes only one-tenth of a second for a person to form an impression, it puts heightened importance on the true value of packaging design. What will their first impression say about your product?
Ensuring your packaging design builds the right perception for your brand, builds and establishes trust, and has that special something that speaks directly to your customer is crucial for the commercial success of your business.
The Power of First Impressions:
Quite often, your product is the first point of contact when introducing your brand to a potential customer for the first time. What signals to each person walking by or scrolling online that your brand is for them?
For a customer that is driven by sustainability, seeing recycled materials used in the packaging, messaging that highlights this, and colour that feels natural is a signal that this product meets some of their purchasing matrices. From that moment, you have their attention.
Understanding exactly who your customer is, what internal matrix they use to make purchasing decisions, and what they value is key to brand success. A deep understanding of your brand's competition is also crucial to your impact upon the first impression. When your product is sat on a shelf in a brick and mortar environment, and it shares the same colours, product benefits, and packaging formats as other brands in that same space, it dilutes the impact of your own first impression.
Understanding the competitor landscape that you play in, and who you will compete with in retail deeply informs the decisions that an experienced packaging designer will consider when crafting your packaging. You’ve only got one chance to make a first impression, so get clear on the specifics and make it count.
Trust, Recognition, and Brand Consistency:
Consistency in branding fosters a sense of recognition and trust in every industry, but it’s especially important in the health, wellness, and beauty landscape as it directly links to the efficacy and safety of the products.
If a customer sees a brand online once, it may not be enough to trust that this brand can deliver against its claims. But if they see a brand showing up with consistency again in a store they love, then again in the hands of one of their favourite social media influencers or better yet, someone they actually know – that recognition goes a very long way toward fostering initial brand trust.
The ability to take that initial trust and recognition and turn that potential customer into a loyal repurchaser is often linked to brand consistency. So your logo has been designed to convey trust, you use your fonts and colours consistently across the board, and you speak to your customers in the same language every time, but what about your packaging? Packaging design has a vital role to play in building trust through quality materials, consistent brand application, and creating a clear and easy-to-navigate product architecture. It also needs to have a protective function to ensure the product your customer purchases remains in one piece and pristine until it’s safely in their hands.
Brand consistency and flexible packaging systems need to play well together to allow a brand to evolve and scale as the years go on. That way, when you launch your second, third, and fourth products later down the line, you leverage already established brand trust and credibility into the easy uptake of your latest product.
Functionality and User Experience:
Functional product design is seamless, fluid, and more often than not, goes unnoticed. But a poorly designed product? You’ll notice that right away. Friction, juggling parts, lids not closing properly, messy application – all signs that form has taken precedence over function. Both form and function need to exist, but when one outweighs the other your customer's experience is impacted and their decision to repurchase is in question.
Incorporating a sense of ease and fluidity into each product experience is the difference between your customer feeling at ease or frustrated when they’re using a product that should promote a feeling of wellness or a sense of calm.
When designing for a new product, we consider a range of different factors that influence the user functionality:
1. The frequency that the product will be used: Is this a daily staple, or a luxurious treat?
2. The location of use: Perhaps you're in the shower, or maybe you’re at your kitchen bench?
3. The consistency of the formulation: Is it fluid, oily, thick, foamy? Is it a capsule you swallow or a chewable tablet? All will influence the application and storage method.
4. Does the product have any storage requirements, like remaining airtight?
This among many other factors are considered when bringing a product to market that customers enjoy using.
Designing for Emotional Connection:
Do you have a product on your beauty shelf that you just love to use? Or a supplement that you take that gives you that feeling of your life being back on track?
There is a high chance those products have been designed to foster a sense of emotional connection that will resonate deepest with their core customers. Packaging can be a storytelling tool, one that can evoke emotional responses in the right group of people; something in the design that pulls on a certain heart string or bolsters a sense of pride.
Creating a positive emotional impact on a person is a wonderful aspiration for a brand to have, as it often means that the company cares deeply about their customer and wants to make even a small slice of their day improved for the better. There are many ways to go about creating this connection, but in many instances, it comes down to colour choice and beyond that, the intersection between colour, shape, and tactility of the design.
People are drawn to soft and smooth textures when they are in need of emotional reassurance, while rougher and harder surfaces are deeper linked to strength and masculinity. How does your customer want to feel when they have found a solution to their needs? If they want to feel stronger, a deep colour choice and a more geometric shape may be the way to their hearts. On the flip side, if your customer wants to feel nurtured, you may lean more toward colours that sit in a muted palette and harness organic shapes and forms in your design.
Nothing more, nothing less:
Over the years, there have been so many different design trends come and go, but whatever the trend; the hallmark of a successful packaging design with longevity and cut-through is the ability to find balance between simplicity and making an impact in a commercial environment.
We’ve all seen the wave of minimalism and ‘clean’ aesthetic sweep through modern brands in the health, beauty, and wellness industry. At one point this allowed these brands to stand out, they were modern, clean, simple, trustworthy. But now that this trend has reached a point of oversaturation, are consumers starting to question this style? Does it portray the same level of sophistication as it once did?
On the flip side, many brands struggle to create new customers and achieve brand loyalty with bloated messaging and cluttered design, trying to claim too big a piece of the pie. It is a common mistake to include every feature and claim on pack in the bid to one-up competitors and convince the market that this is the product to choose over their neighbour. This often results in decision paralysis in customers, branding that loses distinctiveness and marketing that overcomplicates.
So how do you find that sweet spot between loyalty, simplicity, emotional connection and user experience, and make the right impression the first time? It all comes back to your customer, your competitors, your brand's retail strategy and partnering with an experienced brand and packaging designer. Carving out space for you to play, and how you structure each of your product's unique selling propositions are the things that will allow you to cut through, resonate with the right people; your people, and ultimately build a brand that stands the test of time.
