Food Packaging: How to Stand Out on Shelves
Battling for consumers’ attention on the shelves of bricks and mortar retail stores is not easy.
Your products need to stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons while avoiding being overshadowed by the competition.
If you feel that your current approach to food packaging leaves something to be desired, here are some tips on taking it to the next level without making compromises.
Get labelling right
If your labels are poorly fitted or improperly aligned, this can make your product look the second rate and harm your brand’s reputation.
Thankfully there are a few ways around this. For example, you could choose flat pouches, more straightforward to manage from a labelling perspective.
You could also outsource the printing and application of the labels to a specialist firm, saving yourself from the hassle of perfecting this in-house.
Embrace simplicity
Packaging that is made overly busy to catch the eye of casual shoppers can have the opposite effect.
While a person may stop to check out a complex label design, this could also sour their first impression.
The solution is to go simple, paring back different elements of your design such as the colour, the copy and the configuration of the imagery.
You want your food packaging to sell the product concisely, so don’t follow every creative urge you have.
Consider the product & the audience
Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to packaging design is not helpful if your product range is varied, as labelling will work better if it is bespoke and relevant to each item in your range.
Suitability will depend on the nature of the product itself. If you are selling something fun, funky, and aimed at younger audiences, the design has to be reflected.
Likewise, a product aimed at older, upmarket consumers should not be stymied by zany packaging.
Think about sizing
Getting the size of food packaging right is a delicate process since it is necessary to get your items noticed and keep costs in check.
Substantial packaging might sound good on paper from an audience engagement perspective but might be expensive at your end and inconvenient for customers as well.
There are several reasons to rethink packaging size if your sales are in a slump.
Express your food’s flavour
Another clever tactic many food brands use is to give customers a sense of the flavour that customers can expect via the packaging.
This is often done through colour; think bright reds for hot sauces and cool blues for mints and gum.
However, you can also enhance it through things like font choice and imagery.
Honesty is the best policy
Throughout all of this, one thing to keep in mind is that your food packaging has to do an excellent job of accurately representing the product it contains.
If you manage to come up with a killer design that stands out on the shelves, only for buyers to open it and be disappointed by the contents, this will work against you in the long term and could even subvert advertising rules.
Instead, be sure that what you are selling on the outside matches what you get when you open up the packaging.
It’s perfectly okay to employ a bit of hyperbole to help sell your product.
Still, outright untruths or overt exaggerations might mean that even if people buy your food items once, they might never come back for a second serving, which is worth avoiding.
The post Food Packaging: How to Stand Out on Shelves is by Stuart and appeared first on Inkbot Design.
To discover more visit: inkbotdesign.com
