The Interconnection of Branding and Packaging: Understanding Their Relationship
In the dynamic marketing world, branding and packaging act as crucial elements shaping your business values, brand identity and product’s appeal to the consumers. With the ever-evolving digital realm, businesses seek new innovative ways to make their product connect with their target audience.
Enter MindSparkz, a company that offers innovative solutions including branding and packaging. MindSparkz’s team of experts strive to create unique and outstanding products at a budget-friendly cost.
But before making any decision, you should know the importance of branding and packaging for your business. In this article, we dive into the definitions of branding and packaging and how they can help you skyrocket revenue.
Differences Between Branding and Packaging
Quick Comparison Between Branding and Packaging
| Basic Comparison | Packaging | Branding |
| Meaning | Packaging is the process of designing and crafting of the container, cover, or wrapper used to encase the product. | Branding is the process of coming up with a distinct image for a product, fostering trust, and drawing in customers. |
| Objective | To protect and promote the product. | To set the product apart from that of the competition. |
| Focus | Concentrates on practicality and physical protection. | Highlight the brand’s value, vision, and mission |
| Flexibility | Need adjustment to suit the different types, sizes of the product. | Adaptable to almost every change of the market to maintain customer loyalty. |
| Emotional Connection | Mainly serves informational and functional needs. | Strive to connect deeper with customers emotionally. |
| Application | Elements such as color, description, logo, etc. | Elements such as sign, visual imagery, color, etc. |
| Interdependence | Packaging relies on branding as it needs the brand name and logo on it. | Branding does not rely on packaging. |
| Uses | Attract customer’s attention. | Maintain customers and improve their loyalty. |
Understanding The Core Concept Of Branding and Packaging
What Is Branding?
Branding is the process through which the business tries to forge a long-term relationship with its consumers. It also helps the audience see your brand’s values, visions, products, and unique features. The unique features usually include name, logo, color, tone, and image which are all essential elements to tell the story of your brand.
Simply put, branding is how a business aims to build a relationship with its customers. And it can be used as a powerful marketing tool for those who want to take the lead on their competitors. If used correctly, branding creates a substantial difference between you and other businesses in the same industry.
What is Packaging?
As the name implies, the packaging is the process of creating a visually appealing cover, wrapper, and packet that the consumer will be purchasing the product. Covering every step necessary to make a container used to handle, hold and protect the product.
Good packaging catches the public attention and functions as a protective shield for the product. It helps prevent damage during transport and is the first thing consumers interact with before reaching the actual product.
Here are the main objectives of packaging:
- Provide information both persuasive and descriptive about the product.
- Protect the product from any damages during transportation.
- Build, foster and maintain brand awareness.
- Act as a brief six-second advertisement right at the moment of purchase.
The Connection Between Branding and Packaging
Though the two may seem different, they share a deep connection as they are the keys to a successful brand image. Having superior product packaging creates good first impressions of your brand.
Branding maintains that impression while setting your product apart from similar products and creating long-lasting associations with your business.
These two elements work together to support the creation of the brand identity. Many businesses tend to focus more on one and neglect the other which is a fatal mistake.
Let us help you understand the significance of packaging and branding together.
The Role of Branding
As previously stated, branding is all about maintaining customer engagement and interest.
It’s about forging a powerful brand identity and instilling value in the consumer’s mind. This entails highlighting your product’s superior attributes and advantages over your competitors.
In addition, loyal customers typically remain faithful to brands they have come to trust.
There is a common misconception that many people seem to have that branding is only about the name or logo of the business. These elements work together to create the overall brand, but the word “branding” means more than that.
Brand Image
Brand image is the mass perception of your business and consider it as the reputation you currently have. While brand image tends to be more immediate and current state, brand identity is the long-term state of the business.
Brand Identity
Your brand identity is shaped by how you want to represent your business to the world. Understanding your core identity, your aspirations, and the public perception you aim for is crucial. These foundational insights are the initial steps in crafting your brand’s identity.
Brand Personality
Now that you know your identity, it’s time to decide what characteristics you want your brand to have. Like humans, brands should have their personalities to make them more lively and relatable. Whether you choose to be playful and fun, educational and formal, or quirky and slick, developing the brand personality helps you connect with your audience on an emotional level.
Brand Culture
Brand culture refers to the business’s core values and how you show them. Different businesses have different values to suit their brand ethics.
While these are crucial values to uphold, an increasing number of firms are adopting moral and political standards in addition to commonly acknowledged standards. These types of values permeate your brand culture as well.
Here are some prevalent types of branding:
Corporate Branding
Corporate branding refers to the brand image or identity and how it is portrayed to the audience. The brand usually embodies its vision, values, mission and message tone. Consistency is key in corporate branding.
For example, frequently featuring your brand’s message, logo, image and style across all marketing channels/platforms is a must. Such consistency sets your brand apart from the rest while actively enhancing your brand visibility.
Product Branding
Giving the product personality distinctiveness is product branding. Brand breathes life into their product by giving them a unique design, along with their name and brand logo. Promotional products are a good example of product branding.
Promotional products are customized items that businesses can imprint with their brand to offer to clients, customers and partners. Ranging from stationery to clothing and accessories have all become essential components of modern business. They create and maintain a latent impression of the brand over time while giving a sense of familiarity to potential customers.
Retail Branding
Retail branding is a technique for creating a positive image of your store in the eyes of your customers. It is the deliberate acts you take to elicit positive emotions and persuade customers to see your organization in a certain light. In general, a brand is an identity: the story that a company tells to connect with its customers.
The Role of Packaging
The type, design and purpose of the packaging can vastly vary – from simple cardboard to a complex gift box imprinted with a laser engraving logo. Nonetheless, there are a handful of factors that all brands consider when coming up with the design for their packaging.
These detailed factors ensure that the packaging and branding meet the increasingly high standards of manufacturers, consumers, shops, and logistics.
Protect Products
During transit, careless handling can damage the product and greatly decrease its value, so good packaging is vital. Depending on the fragility of the item, extra protection layers are needed.
Typically, for most brands, there are often three layers in their packaging.
Primary packaging: it is the immediate packaging layer of a product, such as a can of tomato sauce.
Secondary packaging: An additional layer provides a safeguard for the products. For instance, the plastic wrapper for the 6-pack of cans.
Transportation packaging: This is the last layer necessary for transportation and storage. For example, the cardboard boxes in which the tomato cans are transported.
Contain Multiple Items
As mentioned, products like tomatoes can be delivered in large batches, from 6 to 10 packs per box, and each pack has at least four or more cans.
Thanks to the packaging, a brand can transport large shipments of products at once.
Improve Storage Effectiveness
In addition, package design can have a significant influence on storage capacity. Unnecessary size and weight limit the number of items that may be kept and increase the risk of item damage during shipment.
Provide Product Information
Packaging contains a vast quantity of information, ranging from usage and storage directions to ingredients. It is critical to consider these factors throughout the package creation process to ensure that crucial information is delivered clearly and readily.
With years of experience, MindSparkz’s team of experts in the design field can help you create one-of-a-kind packaging.
Promote The Brand And Product
In addition to storage and protection, packaging must also provide good product presentation. The mix of visual branding, such as colors and logos, and product display, such as a transparent window on the box lid, can help draw consumer interest by emphasizing the quality of the products.
Want to know more? Click here What Is Product Branding: The Ultimate Guide To Building A Killer Brand Identity
Take Coca Cola for example, their unique wrapper design adds significant value to the brand. In 2016, Coca-Cola started a Christmas campaign in Japan in which their bottle has a label that transforms into a cute festive ribbon which you can use as a gift to your loved ones. This is packaging at its finest.
Importance of Branding and Packaging
Any product you package, whether it is food, electronics, clothes or cosmetics, needs to have its branding positioned strategically to catch the consumer’s attention and imprint itself in their memory.
Having high-quality products is one thing, but making them remember who you are is a different thing. Packaging has a handful of roles in creating a successful branding process.
Rise Above the Noise
With the highly competitive market, it is hard for businesses to stand out if they keep sticking with their old ways. Nowadays, people tend to shop with their eyes, so you only have a small window of opportunity to make the first impression. That is why having eye-catching brand packaging will give you the edge.
At MindSparkz, we will assist you in creating the most distinctive, beautiful, and attention-grabbing content to set yourself out from the crowd.
Optimized Packaging Design Enhances Brand Recognition.
If you have a quick moment to think about some of your favorite brands, their logos, color schemes and packaging designs will likely appear in your mind. That is called successful packaging.
Some instances of strong branding are Apple’s Apple, McDonald’s Golden Arches, Starbucks’ Mermaid, and Domino’s Pizza’s Domino. People may easily recognize all of the brands mentioned above even without knowing their names. This is the outcome of excellent branding and smart packaging.
Impact and Change The Purchasing Habits
Different packaging designs can make a huge impact on how the audience is going to react to them. For instance, designs with little to no branding will not stand out and essentially ignore the product entirely. On the other hand, if the designs have an excessive amount of information, the consumers will likely feel overwhelmed and potentially glance over them.
With that said, knowing how much information, with the right color to make you stand out can go a long way.
Branding and Packaging Through Social Media
In this digital age, social media is one of the main sources of information and news. Having high-quality branding on your packaging can get you pretty far on the market.
According to research, about 74% of the young generation will share images of product packaging they find intriguing on social media. You can take advantage of this behavior with good packaging.
Quality Packaging Represents a Quality Brand
Packaging is the face of your brand as it will be the first thing your customers interact with. Consumers can tell a lot about your brand from the packaging. Therefore, do take extra care to come up with a design that is relatable, high quality and represents your brand.
Product Packaging Challenges
According to research, 66% of consumers switch to new products due to packaging. Good looking packaging is not enough, it must be able to protect the product while having that wow factor for consumers.
Here are some problems you might encounter in the packaging design process.
Sustainable packaging
With the effect of the 2019 pandemic, consumers, brands and governments are now more aware of the environmental problem we have been facing. In addition, sustainability has become one of the biggest concerns for consumers.
In a recent report, global plastic waste production in 2019 was more than double that of 2000, about 353 million tons, with 40% coming from packaging.
Another report for Shopify shows that more than 77% of consumers are concerned about environmental impact.
Therefore, brands are doing their best not only to meet the consumer standard but also to make the world a better place.
Sustainable packaging requires extensive testing, research and resources. In some cases, easy-to-recycle packaging is not as durable. In contrast, some hard-to-recycle packaging is more durable.
Concerns Regarding Packaging Sustainability:
- High cost.
- Recycling and non-recyclable packaging can get mixed up.
- Reduce the packaging recycling capacity due to stamps and laminations.
Wastage Problem
When consumers order something online, the product arrives in giant boxes or plastic packaging resulting in unwanted plastic wastage. Excessive and unnecessary packaging can be a big turn-off for many consumers. The big challenge here is to balance between minimizing plastic waste and ensuring protection.
A report from Clouder shows that more than 60% of respondents have a positive impression of brands that cut down unnecessary packaging.
Ideally, the packaging should be slightly larger than the product to avoid movement during transportation.
Unclear Branding
This is arguably the most frustrating challenge that all companies must overcome when designing their packaging.
The colors, typefaces, images, and text on your packaging speak with your customers about your brand. In contrast, lacking legible fonts for the product name and description might result in missed sales and returns.
Bad Unboxing Experience
According to Google research, 62% of consumers watch unboxing videos before they purchase.
Here are some tips to improve the buyer’s unboxing experience:
- Use branded packaging
- Use unique packaging materials
- Giveaway freebies such as thank-you notes, pens, or small gifts
Packaging Rising Cost
Due to the pandemic and some other international problems, the economy has been unstable in recent years. The price of packaging keep rising due to various reason:
- Surging product demand
- Rising cost for packaging materials
- Higher labor cost, labor shortages and minimum wages hikes
- Inefficiencies in packaging use
- Lacking investment
- High transportation costs
Wrapping Up
Though branding and packaging may seem unrelated to each other, they are two fundamental pillars of marketing. Both are interconnected and help you build customer trust, brand loyalty and awareness. They go hand in hand to convey your message, product identity and business values.
MindSparkz Can Help You Overcome Branding and Packaging Obstacles
Branding and packaging processes can be a hassle and sometimes overwhelming for many businesses. Why waste your time and resources trying to make something that you don’t even know would work out in your favor? When you can focus your efforts in doing other aspects of your business like expanding the market, and leave the hard work to us.
We here at MindSparkz strives to become the best at what we do. We provide innovative ideas, up-to-the-minute concepts to slick up your brand personality. We dedicate ourselves to follow you through the entire process from brainstorming your packaging ideas to how it can improve your branding.
Our mission is to help you establish your brand on the market and stand out from the rest with a WOW factor. Our custom product packaging design specialists will provide you with everything you need to elevate your brand identity.
We are more than just a creative product packaging design agency, we are your business partner. Get in touch with us TODAY.
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What Is Branding?
It is the process of establishing brand identity for a business/company. It provides elements to support the brand such as tagline, logo, visual design, message tone.
What Is Packaging?
Packaging is the process of protecting a product in a container to help with distribution, storage, usage, promotion, branding and identification.
What Is Branding And Packaging Connection?
They go hand in hand and are crucial for a company as they are the navigator for the consumer to find and recognize them among other products. Good branding makes the first impression on the consumers. A product packaging appeal to the consumers making a lasting first impression.
