by Miriam Hara | Mar 24, 2015 | Business Success, Creative, Design, Latest
Packaging design has always been touted as the “art of art”. If a designer can make it as a packaging designer, they can make it anywhere! Developing great packaging design is essential for any brand. Often the package is the only advertising a product does while sitting on shelf. It goes without saying that capturing the consumer’s attention on shelf is paramount for any product.
How do you turn good packaging into great packaging?
Here are some contributing factors that make a world of difference towards the success of package design:
Production Knowledge:
It’s important to understand that a package design won’t live in the environment where it was created. Many beautiful designs falter when they are produced in mass. What’s the point of designing and presenting a package that can’t be reproduced effectively? More importantly, what’s the point of designing a great looking package that adds to the costs of goods – thereby affecting the ROI of the product? Essentially, it’s all about production: Designing with the knowledge of production and the printing processes in mind will make you a packaging design hero.
Market Understanding: Competition
It may seem to be a motherhood statement although I say this with the utmost respect: Designers shouldn’t just design. Packaging design, or any commercial design doesn’t live in a vacuum. Packaging design must compete against other products and their packaging design. Packaging design must respect the tone and character of the brand and more importantly, it must maintain its individuality. If being a me-too brand is the objective, well the design is already dictated, isn’t it?
Market Understanding: Culture and Consumer
Hand in hand with competitive evaluation is the need to assess and understand whom you are designing for. It’s important to design within the framework of the culture to make the design relevant and to have it resonate to the intended target audience. There’s a lot of marketing that goes into a packaging design, so research is key. Listening to the research feedback is monumental.
Design for Performance:
Packaging design must perform on shelf. Although I love the use of “white” space, sometimes it’s just not the right strategy to employ in order to gain optimal on-shelf performance. Depending on the product category, it’s important to see how the design works on shelf with all the visual noise that goes with it. Be honest with the design. Even though it hurts to let a “beautiful” design go, if it doesn’t perform, it will be let go eventually and the cost associated will be significant.
This is only a short list of what I view as important to creating great packaging design. Do you have any other considerations to add? I would love to hear about them.
P.S. If you love design as much as I do, download our design eBook: re:design here.
by Miriam Hara | Mar 13, 2015 | Branding, Business Success, Communications, Latest, Management, Social Media
Could it be that corporate social media has seen its day in the sun? Only a few short years ago social media growth was exponential. Now it’s slowing down – almost to a crawl. Yet the explosion of the social media channel caused major corporations and small businesses alike to throw budget and people power at it.
Today, I feel that the burst of corporate social media has come and gone. Now, corporate social media as a channel has taken its place alongside the many other communications channels that are available to businesses and their brands. Corporations are reallocating the resources they once channeled into their corporate social media initiatives to other marketing, sales and customer service departments.
It wasn’t that long ago that social media as a communications channel was the place to be, especially for big corporations. Business and brands alike jumped on the bandwagon to be among the first or second waves of those to be part of the corporate social media growth phenomena.
It’s a little disconcerting that what was just recently touted as the channel to be in, is now almost an add-on in the corporate landscape. Why is this happening? Has business grown more fickle? Or is it that corporate social media initiatives haven’t delivered the desired results?
Like any emerging channel, corporate social media had a growth/learning curve. This resulted in ill-defined tasks and roles as well as a lack of understanding about realistic objectives or ROI expectations. The essence of social media is that it takes time. It takes effort and it takes patience. The expectation of a quick ROI was ill-founded. Corporations saw small businesses, entrepreneurs and even everyday people take to social media and succeed virally – thinking it was easy. Inevitably many found out that it wasn’t that easy and even if initiatives did achieve viral status, few garnered true ROI.
The state of corporate social media is really sitting on a precarious perch. It’s at risk of becoming part of corporate communications, or even worse, shared by many departments with no one strategy leading the way. Many would say that social media is part of corporate communications. Well, maybe I just see it differently.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this? Do you agree that social media as a channel in business is moving away from what it was intended to be?
by Miriam Hara | Mar 12, 2015 | Advertising, Business Success, Creative, Latest, Marketing
In order to maintain creative integrity when discussing concept ideas with your client, it’s paramount to listen to what they are not saying. The art of listening has long been deemed as the key to success in any sales situation. And that is very true. The same is also true when selling creative and conceptual approaches to marketing professionals.
Developing creative concepts and advertising campaigns makes creative professionals part of the marketing profession. Although, there is a basic difference between marketing professionals and creative professionals. I’d like to be clear before going any further. Being creative or being a marketing professional, are not mutually exclusive. All professions need creative thinkers. However, in the context of this discussion, I am referring to creative professionals who are mandated on a daily basis to develop “creative” approaches to marketing challenges and initiatives. For all you creative types out there, you know that your creative mind works a little differently than most. It operates by thinking in visual and conceptual terms. This does not come naturally everyone. Creative thinkers are able to fit many subtle nuances and pieces of a puzzle together into a cohesive message that resonates to a core audience – all the while, making it easy on the eye!
Far too often when presenting creative concepts and programs to brand and marketing professionals, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the creative integrity of the program. Here are a few tips to help that process:
Don’t take feedback at face value: Often when receiving changes to the creative from a client, feedback is given in the form of direction. For example: Move this up, or move this down. Try to determine what is at the source of that direction. What does the client actually want to achieve?
Be prepared to educate: It’s important for those of us who sell and more importantly, develop creative, to have an educational mandate as well. I have found the best results occur after I illustrate or “show” the client direction requested. This is when I show a different creative solution that resolves the issue.
Speak frankly: Far too often, the selling through of a creative takes over the creative integrity. When the creative goes into a direction that it was never intended to, it’s success is in jeopardy. The program may also be in risk of not resonating with the intended audience. Clients expect your frankness. In fact, that is why you’re at the table.
I invite you to download our design and marketing ebooks found here. Are there any tips that you can add? Please do!
by Miriam Hara | Mar 10, 2015 | Advertising, Agency, Branding, Business Success, Communications, Latest
How do you determine if your branding and advertising agency is your true soul mate?
In today’s fast-paced market conditions it’s important for your agency to be part of your marketing team. What makes a branding and advertising agency a true partner? In order to come up with a good answer, what needs to be established is: What are your expectations of an agency? Is it great creative? Is it thinking outside of the box?
It goes without saying that every relationship takes two parties to come together and it’s based on both parties’ willingness to make it work. The basis of this article however, is about the degree of difficulty to making the relationship work.
Here are a few indicators to determine if the branding and advertising agency you have on board really is your business soul mate.
Adding value: The sign of a good agency is that it acts as your partner. Your agency should also always have the brand’s or business’s best interest at heart. In order to do that, they need to anticipate the needs of the brand and bring forward any issues they foresee. They need to take the brief you provided and expand on it – adding alternatives that you as a brand manager may not have thought of.
Attention to detail: When time is of the essence and turnarounds are quick, team players must all do their part to make sure that details are accurately addressed. Regardless of the relationship you have, “My bad.” shouldn’t cut it as an excuse.
Meeting budgets: Your agency needs to be in control of projects and their budgets, not the other way around. One sure way of knowing if an agency does exercise control, is if they have the ability to raise a flag at the precise time that a project’s budget starts going north.
Delivery on timelines: Let’s face it, an agency’s role is to help make the brand team look good. One of the easiest ways to do so is by meeting timelines. The agency world is all about deadlines, does your agency meet yours?
Creative relevance: It’s important for any brand initiative that the communications set forth have creative relevance. It’s not about pretty pictures, or creative awards. It’s about strategy and resonating with the consumer base. If you find that you constantly have to wrestle with your agency about what your brand is about and meeting requirements, maybe they are not the “one”.
Do you agree? What are some issues you have come across when dealing with your branding and advertising agency?
by Miriam Hara | Mar 3, 2015 | Advertising, Business Success, Latest, Marketing
In today’s business environment it is increasingly difficult to carve out an edge. So it’s understandable that when something works, one might continue to do it on an annual basis – and that’s a marketing pitfall prevalent in many businesses. Marketing complacency is a sure way to lose your business edge and start down the slippery slope towards total oblivion. In order to survive and make a mark for your brand or business it’s imperative to create excitement and provide momentum for consumers. This can only happen if you develop engaging marketing initiatives. It’s always the better ideas that require some measure of risk. However any marketing program, from a sweepstakes to an annual event comes with risk. But remember, it’s a calculated risk.
Not so long ago, consumers anticipated the Christmas season simply because the cosmetic counters in department stores would become jam-packed with great manufacturer offers and value-add packages. Consumers would wait to purchase their “product needs”, just to make sure they took advantage of the best value. Eventually cosmetic manufacturers’ caught on to this and now tier their giveaways or value offers throughout the year.
For those of us in Canada, Tim Hortons’ “Roll up the rim to win” is a reoccurring campaign. The first year it was launched was 1986. Now granted it has evolved and grown. For the first decade, when it was continuing to evolve, I believe it was exciting – even the advertising slogan was fantastic. Now, decades later they are still running it. And every year my reaction is, “Oh, that again”. Mind you, I’m sure that the reaction of the winners is quite different! But I would really like to know the uptake of this promotion after all these years. Is it still garnering the same results? Maybe the objective has also evolved? Perhaps it now acts as a reward program to existing consumers rather than one to increase trial?
Marketing complacency is a result of marketers pressing the autopilot button.
Think about what the premise is of any marketing promotion or advertising campaign. When a new marketing program is launched, it’s the result of many different factors. These include current market conditions, competitive landscape, creative brainstorming, research and timing – to name only a few. Consider this: Doing the same thing year after year may result in missing out on the next big idea that could make a huge impact for your brand or business.
When the same successful campaign is repeated over and over, the impact becomes less and less – or worse yet, expected by consumers. Many programs when repeated on an annual basis end up subsidizing sales, not increasing them. The result is that what was once fresh and exciting becomes old news. When marketing complacency sets in, there’s no win for the brand or business.
What do you think?
