by Miriam Hara | Dec 4, 2012 | Branding, Design
Developing packaging starts with the size and shape of the actual package. The format adds a point of differentiation that is key to consumer pick-up and sales performance. Product packaging is a marketing art. It must speak to the product it houses, tout its benefits and engage the passerby with attractive graphics – enough to pick it up and persuade them to buy it!
It’s a tall order for even the biggest package. Yet, taking a walk down the aisle of a grocery retailer, mass merchandiser or pharmacy retailer, I find that a lot of packaging doesn’t make the cut. Too often I see packages that have “lazy” design. They don’t work hard enough to earn my interest or more importantly, gain my trust in the brand.
Here are 3 brand packaging requirements:
Packaging design is about more than just a pretty on-shelf face, it’s about originality. It requires a lot of design sense to organize all the necessary information on what is usually very little real estate. And no, it’s not about slapping on a stock image to tell a story. I believe in original photography or illustration. How can you show your brand is unique if the one image on its package can be seen in an ad or POP for another brand? It’s about layering design elements to make the package more unique and appealing. Understanding and treating the type to give it propriety, while allowing for design trademark only adds cache to the product. Equally important is the placement of information. It needs to lead the consumer to read the relevant content and assist them in making the right purchasing decision.
Package design must have Brand Charisma. Just like TV campaigns, print ads or any other brand communications, brand packaging must carry the brand character, personality and voice. It has to be all about the brand persona. It may very well be the first piece of communications that your target market sees of your brand; therefore, it must establish its brand style right away. Packages that slap on stock photography to tell the story or don’t pay enough attention to visual and written messaging miss a huge opportunity to stand apart.
Packaging must sell. Getting my attention is half the battle, now you need to talk to me… in the way that I wish to be spoken to. If the product is premium priced (targeting a more affluent consumer), the packaging must reflect that. There’s nothing worse than demanding an elevated retail price for a product while not supporting that emotively! Purchasing decisions, small or large, require cognitive reinforcement. Packaging must speak effectively to its intended consumer.
Ultimately packaging design shouldn’t be viewed as ‘cost of goods sold’. When you are designing your package, seek expert counsel. It’s a marketing initiative, so it’s not the place to start cutting costs. Packaging shouldn’t be viewed as a cost, it should be viewed as an investment.
What are some good examples of solid brand packaging design that you’ve seen? Please share them here.
by christine | Nov 22, 2012 | Branding, Business Success, Interactive, Social Media
The Social Media skills now required to maintain a good social media reputation has evolved. Most of us (businesses and brands) have our social listening strategy in place, writing content and posting on our social media accounts. So…how is it going? Are you monitoring your accounts, interacting with your followers on each account? If you are, good. We all know that it’s imperative to listen to what your customers have to say… as this will keep your brand honest and transparent.
Does your social media strategy include the necessary social media skills?
Being proactive in your social media accounts has never been more important. With the daily launches of new social media blogs and sites, keeping on top of your brand’s social calendar takes time and resources. Don’t lose faith! These efforts can and will be reap Brand rewards in the end. Engagement with your customers is imperative to keep the “stickiness” on your sites and also loyalty and trust with your brand. More importantly understanding and knowing how to handling both positive and negative feedback properly can be indeed a powerful tool to gain loyalty from your target audience and enhancing their experience with your brand. Keep in mind these steps below to become socially proactive:
1. Proactive and engagement on your social accounts should be your primary measurement of how your brand is doing. Keep an active conversation with your customers, so when and if a problem arises you can respond quickly with a solution
2. Respond Quickly to all Social Media Feedback, especially negative.
3. Don’t script your response. Be human and sensitive… an actual “real” live sensitive caring person (customized responses will go a long way to creating a supportive community online).
4. Support your response with detailed information; again give qualified information to help turn the negative experience into a resolved, positive experience. (We all remember being on the other end of those endless customer automated phone messages…that keep telling us to press the next sequence of number’s to get help, but in the end, it feels like we are on a never ending carousel spinning round and round, and in the end we hang up out of frustration or just get lost in a loop of unhelpful automated annoying computer generated voices.) We want our customers to feel that someone is actually listening and with a positive timely response your customers will probably post a very sincere thank you back and become a loyal customer in the end.
5. Dedicated customer service email and resources are a must. In support to #3, you have to specifically set up for your social media accounts. This will help garner a great customer support service within your social media communities. You should allow for a dedicated resource for these platforms to monitor what’s being talked about online and also join in on the conversation to build strong relationships and provide positive customer experiences.
6. Be Honest and Transparent…this will go a long way for validating that yes we all make mistakes, but lets work together to fix it and make it better by actually listening to what your customers are saying.
7. Be Empathic, stay objective. Look at it from the consumers point of view, have all your facts and as said earlier try to resolve as quickly as possible.
Now to make it all work! Now that you have your social listening strategy, resources, and your social customer service in place you need to add some tools to help you get the edge on your competition by taking charge of your social media and your online presence. You can start with some free resources and or customized packages. No tools work the same, so do your research. This is just a small sampling of links below to get you started:
RSS Feeds, Google Alerts, Track Tweets, Comments and Discussions on fan boards, etc, and Netvibes
Want to know more about social media? Download Social Media Understood here.
Please feel free to add comments, tips, and suggestions; I always like to hear how other people adapt new strategies to their social accounts. And remember be Proactive!
by christine | Nov 9, 2012 | Advertising, Branding, Business Success, Creative, Design
As a creative person, passionate about digital media, graphic design and the visual arts, colour has always been an important factor in my work.
How colours interact with each other or to a specific object can be significant especially in design. The same can be said about how colour relates to your brand and its impact on the consumer and what emotive feeling will be identified with your brand. Will the perception of your brand be a positive or negative behavioural reaction?
Pairing the wrong colour palette with your brand can kill your identity. It’s important to know your target audience, culturally, geographically, gender, age, and also the purpose for your campaign so that you launch your business in the right direction.
Just by viewing a colour in a design, and how it interacts with your brand can completely change or send out a false representation of your brand to the viewer. Colour is such a powerful and important communication tool that it should not be neglected; it is part of our daily actions in life represented in religious, cultural, political and social influences.
Studies have shown when users are shown a bright red hue; it will create a physical feeling of anxiousness and an increase in heart rate. This would not be a good use of colour if used on the interior walls of an emergency room, but if the colour red were associated with food, it would be a positive action to a reaction. You want the consumer to feel hungry and in a response really need to go out and purchase your product.
There is so much more complexity to colour and colour theory and I could go on, but maybe I will save that for another blog.
*Just a note you may want to check out a few of my favourite artist’s that were really the pioneers with colour theory– Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc to name a couple.
Marc
http://www.franzmarc.org/The-Red-Horses.jsp
http://artsconnected.org/collection/111185/franz-marc
Kandinsky
http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/
by Miriam Hara | Nov 5, 2012 | Branding, Business Success, Social Media
With so much of business communications today being in the written channel, and so much of it being immediate with Social Media, the tone in which a brand communicates with is increasingly important. We all know that so much of what we say really comes down to how we say it. The same choice of words can come across as either complimentary or insulting. Ultimately, it’s all in the delivery.
Deciphering communication tonality in the digital space isn’t easy. The handling and implementation of any social media initiative (especially when it deals with a brand) is fraught with potentially explosive minefields. Brands are complex entities, and as such a brand’s attitude, style and characteristics must be taken into account with every Facebook update, LinkedIn response or blog post.
So how can you make the most of your Brand’s social media initiatives and business communications? By ensuring that you strike the right cord and the proper stance in all your online communications. Here’s how:
- Take a page or two from your marketing plan… truthfully. We all can agree that the social media channel is relatively new, while Marketing is not. Go back to the basics. What makes your brand special to its audience? Look to how your brand communicates in the more classic channels, such as print ads, radio ads or even packaging. If it’s a product, how does the package look? If it’s a service, what does the name and logo represent? If you’ve advertised in community papers or created radio ads, you already have a good basis of understanding of what your tonality should be. Are you casual? Formal? Sophisticated? Friendly? Is your brand body language open, informative and approachable or at arm’s length? Regardless of style, your brand must always be honest, straightforward and truthful.
- Understand your audience. Knowing who your target audience is… well, not enough. Like everything else in branding or business, understanding your audience on a deeper level is essential to your brand’s success. What makes them purchase your brand? What’s their style? Do they enjoy extreme sports? Drive a sports car? Like fishing? Answering these and other questions will allow your brand to connect with its audience and meet their expectations. If your brand needs to put on a suit or dress business casual, then your writing tonality should follow the same line.
- Follow the Brand Guidelines. If your brand doesn’t have any, then you should seriously consider creating them. It use to be that brand guidelines spoke only to the visual treatment of a brand’s logo. (typesetting, font, colour, etc), However today’s guidelines also cover brand voice and brand persona which are very good indicators and references for brand tonality.
- Stay consistent with your brand’s persona. Is you brand premium priced? Made in Europe? American? Canada? Is it an innovative product, or just a better or cheaper version of an existing one? All of these factors play a significant role in determining what your brand’s social media tonality will be.
- Take the lead from your brand’s website. It is important to understand and address the digital channel in its entirety. Your brand’s social media efforts must be an extension of your brand’s website. The tonality for the brand must be holistic. Websites should always be created with a sound understanding of brand voice and brand persona. If this is the way your brand’s site was written, you already have a good foundation for developing your style with posts or blogging.
Your brand’s body language is determined by your brand’s tonality. Make sure you’ve got the right posture to make sure your brand’s success in your social media initiatives.
by Miriam Hara | Oct 29, 2012 | Advertising, Branding, Business Success
The word branding is definitely a verb. It takes thought, intention and actions to turn a brand into a Brand.
If you take a product that delivers on its promise, give it a great name, an iconic logo and a fantastic well thought out tagline, you’re set – you have the makings of a brand. All of these elements are great, but quite frankly, if you don’t intentionally do, you’ll risk your Brand’s demise or fall short of your Brand’s potential. In order for a brand to become a Brand, it must in fact start to act. It’s important to not only look like a brand – it’s important to “walk” like a brand. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a corporate executive in charge of brand marketing; an individual trying to become a personal brand or a major chain retail outlet; the act of becoming a brand is essentially the same
In order for a product to become a brand and establish itself as a winning brand it must adhere to the following brand exercises:
Brand Consistency: Your audience needs to recognize your Brand instantly. How can they do that if consumers are always being shown inconsistencies in style, colour, tonality or voice. Determine what these brand layers are for your Brand and feature your Brand within the same context, consistently, consecutively and simultaneously. Brand can only be established if the message is always presented in the same way. There are no short cuts in developing a brand. Cost cutting measures early in the game will often harm the Brand’s development and stunt its growth… indefinitely.
Repetitive Brand Visibility: It doesn’t matter if it’s by placing a business card sized ad in the community paper or developing a full-scale national advertising campaign, whatever your Brand is about, its messaging must be consistent with every communications initiative. Think of it like filling a bucket with water, one drop at a time. All these drops will eventually fill the bucket. Branding is about repeating your message, in a variety of different ways. It doesn’t matter if it’s an event, social media endeavour, advertising campaign, premium giveaway or a website – all visibility goes into the same bucket.
Brand Originality: Dare for your brand to be “un”-ordinary. Yes, be over the top if needed – “extra”-ordinary. If you are trying to achieve your Personal Brand or launching a product, dare to be bold in how and where you communicate. Just like no two people are truly alike, the same applies to brands – no two are alike. Take one element of your Brand’s Persona (big or small) and blow it out of proportion. This refers to colour, typeface, logo, or even a sound logo. Whatever element it is, it must be your Brand’s and your Brand’s alone. This will allow you to “own” the market. Others can and will try to mimic your brand, but they will end up falling short.
Consistency, repetitive brand visibility and originality – these actions will turn your brand into a Brand.
