If packaging is essential in marketing your brand, pay attention to shape as you attend trade shows and conferences this fall. Designers who focus on structural packaging form have long considered their craft something of a "dark art," compared with the perceived sexier world of colors and graphics, but that is evolving.
A consensus of experts who focus on package structure agree that more brand marketers are beginning to understand not only the importance of a package's shape in brand communication, but also how to use it effectively.
Stuart Leslie, President of 4sight Inc., is among them. "Bright colors will draw the consumer's eye to a package, but the shape and form tell the story of the brand," Leslie says. "Form helps them to discover the elements, the qualities of a product. They believe what they see with their own eyes."
Trust in the brand is critical as products proliferate across all categories. The importance of shape in brand communication was no more clearly expressed than in an engaging exercise at our Shelf Impact! Package Design Workshops, which recently concluded for 2008 in Salt Lake City, UT. SI Publisher Jim Chrzan and I handed each PDW attendee a worksheet bearing only the package, product, or logo silhouette of 12 brands—some are household names and others a little less well-known. We challenged our workshop participants to identify each brand.
To protect the embarrassed, I'll spare you the hilarious wild guesses that were made. Most important, eight or nine of the silhouettes were universally identified, and a couple others drew only a few incorrect answers. Notably, the scores were 100% for the ever-familiar Coca-Cola contoured bottle and Heinz's tapered ketchup bottle. Those two shapes are distinctive, but their value for their respective brands goes far beyond having statuesque curves and angles simply for appearance sake.
What the experts are saying, and what our workshop exercise reinforces, is that packaging teams are recognizing the idea of a distinctive shape as an investment that enhances brand value. If your brand is in "economizing" mode as a rough 2008 begins its fade into the sunset, you might want to re-examine the long-term impact that packaging form can bestow on your brand.
When you look at shape as one spoke in the wheel of an overall packaging efficiency effort, the reasons behind a decision to invest time and money in structural form become much clearer and justifiable. More about that in future issues of Shelf Impact!
I welcome your comments. Please call me at 630/897-7158 or contact me by e-mail.
By Jim George, Editor
