The best packages compel consumers to sense the pleasure in using the product, giving them space to personalize meaning and build relevance.
Great packages communicate so effectively on a sensual and emotional level that a consumer can’t help but pick them up. They lend the product inside a special beauty all its own, so that consumers are drawn to the product because the package has made that product aesthetically pleasing.
Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style, uses the phrase the “aesthetic imperative” to describe this dynamic between the consumer and the package. Following are three packages that reflect Postrel’s thinking.
1. Venus owns a position
Superior performance is fundamental to any successful product. But the right packaging is essential to transforming a product into a brand and creating a compelling and ownable position in the market. Gillette gained these insights through extensive discussions with women. Where men treat shaving as a daily ritual, women view it as a process of discovery to “make her feel her best,” says Mary Ann Pesce, President of the Gillette Co.’s Personal Care Group.
This revelation of the “beauty within” shaped the branding platform for Venus, with packaging color and graphics communicating the exhilaration of transformation and personal empowerment, Pesce says.
Sales are growing 26% annually, having exceeded $500 million.
2. Sheba builds touch equity
Marketers use the term “touch equity” to describe the power of tactile packaging as a purchase motivator. In pet food, Masterfoods USA uses sensory illusion to create touch equity. Consumers are drawn to touch the “fishnet” that appears to bundle two six-count multipacks of the Fishnets sub-brand of Sheba cat food.
In reality, the black net is a pattern that’s flexographically printed on a proprietary-blend polyolefin shrink film from Exopack. The film’s high clarity and puncture resistance provide the no-label look that creates the fishnet illusion, says Masterfoods’ Erin Ferraiuolo.
3. Lean Cuisine: Simple is the new better
“The most successful brands are finding they connect with their core enthusiasts when they use an effective visual shorthand,” says Rob Wallace, Managing Partner at Wallace Church Associates. “The key strategy shared by these successful brands is that their messages, their identities, and their entire communications architectures are, quite simply, simple.”
Wallace offers Nestlè’s Lean Cuisine as an example. The brand of prepared frozen dinners uses a distinctive palette of colors, succulent product photography, icons, and lots of “white space” to communicate one message—tasty and healthful eating—on its cartons.
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By Jim George, Editor-in-Chief
