Even small businesses spend thousands of pounds on marketing and brand identity. However, all too many of them overlook one of the most effective (and least expensive) marketing tools of all, simple shelf appeal.
Presenting your product in the right way – making good packaging choices and using high quality printed labels – tells potential customers a great deal more about your brand than you might think.
Using Packaging to Define Your Brand
Of course we’re biased, but we really do feel that every manufacturer, importer, and other business that uses custom packaging labels should invest some portion of their marketing or branding budget on better product packaging.
Make sure that your packaging ‘sells’ not just this product but also your company as one which upholds values which are important to them. This is an opportunity to appeal to new and returning customers alike, using images, textures and other methods that evoke emotions. They are much more important than words.
Choose colours that not only reflect your brand or logo, but will influence the way a customer feels about the product, and by extension your company. Make sure the colours you choose convey emotions appropriate to your brand identity, and make sure that identity remains a positive one!
Make packaging decisions that target segments of your market specifically. Some will be swayed more by packaging they perceive as ecologically friendly than by ‘high spec’ packaging. Others will feel exactly the opposite. Know your customers, and give them what they need to feel good about you, and themselves.
Upscale your Brand with Custom Printed Packaging Labels on Rolls
Labelling can be a particular challenge, as you have two separate, often adversarial, sets of requirements. Not only must your labelling ‘sell’ a positive brand image, it usually has to comply with quite a few safety regulations and other legal requirements. Whilst there is no skimping on regulatory compliance, you can design a fully compliant label that is also quite attractive, and which gives shoppers all the ‘right’ signals when it comes time to pick one product or another off the shelf.
This is no different from the overall packaging guidelines above – but is perhaps even more important, as canny consumers look closely at packaging labels to compare vital information, whilst only glancing at other aspects of the packaging. This gives you ‘two bites at the apple’, as you can engage both their conscious and unconscious minds with the right custom packaging labels.
Another trick some manufacturers miss is choosing a high quality label stock, and a few optional extras (foil stamping, embossing, and other finishing touches) to make their product really stand out. These may cost a fraction of a penny more, but they tell customers that you believe your product deserves this kind of labelling. They’ll even happily pay a bit more for your product, and honestly believe that it is worth more, just because you show them that it is.
Lastly, we can produce all manner of non-bottle and non-packaging items as well, all with colours and materials appropriate to your brand story. Promotional stickers are particularly popular, and generate a huge response (not only from children, either).
‘Expensive’ printed packaging labels don’t have to ‘be’ expensive!
We can help you keep the cost of premium printed package labels down by producing them on rolls. These need not be set up for use by a mechanical labelling device, though of course they can be. Many of our clients label their products by hand, and use handheld dispensers to apply these roll labels, saving time and effort as well.
Show your customers that your product is worthy of a fine label, by using one.
In the end, we are very visual creatures. If we see two essentially identical products on a shelf, we’ll feel better about choosing the one that looks ‘better’ – prettier, more professional, or in better crafted packaging, even if we don’t have any way of comparing actual quality. If you don’t make the right packaging decisions – including using attractive and well-constructed packaging labels – all of your marketing efforts can fail at the last minute, when the shopper chooses the brand next to yours just because it ‘looks better’.
