Brand building examples: 4 fantastic packaging variations
How do you build your brand through packaging? Well, now more than ever, packaging is seen as a reflection of your brand, and has seen an explosion of creativity and innovation over the past few years alone. Packaging design has become so integral to buying, you’d be mad to not utilise the different variations out there. An innovative packaging variation can make a truly positive impact on your customer base, and these four brand building examples show why.
The Graze box revolution
Snack foods have long been available in small plastic punnets with film lids. Graze took the concept a step further by placing punnets into four separate compartments within cardboard boxes.
Convenience and personalisation are the core features of the Graze box. Customers customise their snack selection from an extensive range of options, and have them delivered to their home or office.
The sealed punnets keep the snacks fresh and the sturdy cardboard box prevents damage during transportation. Being in transit with other goods, the box must have solid protection, especially when they are pushed through letterboxes. Who wants to end up with broken breadsticks and pummelled peanuts?
The box is cleverly the right size to fit through a letterbox and is recyclable to boot. It’s convenient, fast and sustainable. Graze’s innovative box helped the company achieve a sales growth of 31% between February 2013 and February 2014. So, if you’re in the food industry and you want to sell more of your product, think about what customers look out for packaging-wise in your industry. Is it convenience? Or is aesthetically pleasing packaging what they’re after? All you have to do is look at Graze’s success to see the worth in finding out this information.
AIAIAI’s sound idea for headphones
Small headphones often come in plastic packaging that has to be opened with scissors. Once opened, the headphones are susceptible to damage and normal wear and tear.
Danish electronics company AIAIAI solved this problem by bringing an already familiar type of packaging, the plastic tube, into play. The tube is sturdy and protects the headphones while the user isn’t listening to music. How many times have you plugged your headphones in only to find one doesn’t work?
Repurposing packaging that is normally associated with foods, pharmaceuticals and stationery is innovative enough, but AIAIAI’s tube offers more. For extra convenience, it is capped at both ends by miniature containers, similar to pill-boxes, each holding two earpieces of different types: protective and functional.
Coca Cola: what’s in a name?
Innovations aren’t always centred on the container, however. A fizzy drink, for example, comes in a plastic bottle for protection and portability. So why change this?
Packaging is also used for promoting the product within and even household names such as Coca-Cola have to keep their brands in the public eye.
To this end, Coca-Cola came up with an innovative marketing campaign: ‘Share a Coke’. This featured bottles with personalised labels. In place of the usual ‘Coca-Cola’, a range of the most popular first names were printed on the bottles.
This was the first time in history that the company hadn’t prominently displayed the product name. Initially, the campaign excluded uncommon names, but the range of available names later expanded. It is now possible for customers to order personalised bottles of Coca-Cola online, printed with any name of their choice.
Personalising packaging helps to further connect you with your customer base — constantly keeping you in their minds.
Interapothek’s innovative lifesaver
Fizzy drinks will not suffice for people who have lost vital electrolytes as a result of diseases such as diarrhoea. Oral rehydration is essential to replenishing these electrolytes and, to do this, salts have to be mixed with water so that they can be taken as a drink. However, the trouble is that many people throughout the world have no access to water that is fit to drink. Additionally, ready-mixed solutions need refrigerating and have a very short shelf-life.
In collaboration with Mix Pak System, Spanish pharmaceutical company Interapothek has developed an innovative oral rehydration pouch. Within this pouch are two compartments: one contains water, the other a re-hydration salt powder. The shelf life of this package is two years. When the water and salts are mixed together, the solution formed can be drunk immediately.
The innovative aspect of this product is what separates the chambers in the pouch: a resin, which fragments when the compartment holding the water is pressed, allowing the contents to mix. This simple feature could save people’s lives in areas where there is no clean water or electricity and where transportation is difficult.
This year, Interapothek won a DuPont Silver Award for Packaging Innovation, which is sure to gain the brand much deserved international recognition.
Expanding your brand by paying attention to your packaging is essential to awareness in the current market. To find out more ways how you can improve this, head over to the brand building centre to find out more.
Sarah Hickson
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