Bad Package Design can be Dangerous

The package design is often key to the success of a product. It makes the first impression with the customer and is also something that 100% of your customers interact with. Package design is also single-handedly responsible for making your product stand out on the shelves, and brighter than competitors.

It’s also critical to making sure that people stop and pay attention to your product in this world where the average attention span of a shopper is reducing alarmingly. How does the package design do all this?

Well, that’s something for later. For now, we’re going to focus on the importance of good package design, or in other words, the dangers of bad package design. First, let’s understand the makings of a good package design.

Good Package Design – How it Works

A good package design is great for improving product sales. Here are the primary benefits of a good package design:

  1. A good package design attracts people. Poorly designed packages are ignored or might even repulse consumers. Attraction is important because only after that can you make your sales pitch with whatever communication or message you have on your package.
  2. Good package design is the only way to stand out from the crowd. If you don’t go for something original, unique, or unconventional even, your product will drown in the abyss of the infinite number of products all over the markets.
  3. The package design will be interacted with by all of your consumers. As such, it helps to provide additional value to the consumer. For example, if certain package designs are so good that the consumer might keep the package at home for storage purposes, this will build an emotional connection between your brand and the product over time.

Problems with Bad Package Design

Apart from everything that a bad package design fails to do (make your product stand out, attract potential buyers, or build an emotional connection with your consumers), it might actually hamper your brand image.

It’s not rare that we hear a story of how bad package design led to an outcry. For example, Tonix – a floor cleaner, is named and designed in a way that it looks like a carbonated drink. Such bad designs can harm consumers. 94 people ingested Fabuloso in 2006 – a household cleaner that had fruits and nature on its package design.

Needless to say, people who have had a bad experience with a product simply because of misunderstanding the package design or the label will not be brand advocates.

Apart from a bad experience, bad package design will additionally cause these problems:

Confusing Consumers with an Unclear Message

If the message or the communication on the package design isn’t clear-cut, then you run the risk of confusing consumers. This also prolongs the time they need to understand the product, which is the first step towards selling. If it takes too long to make sense, then consumers will just move on to the next product that makes more sense.

Baffling Consumers by Overloading them with Information

Sometimes, the design is okay but there’s simply too much information on the package. This leads to people finding it hard to ascertain whether or not they would like to purchase the product. Though a well-designed product will still work, if there are too many elements fighting for attention, none of the USPs will get the attention they deserve. This will thus effectively dilute the importance of product features. Don’t overload your package design with too much information or too many USPs. Keep it simple.

Providing no Value to the Consumer

Focusing too much on selling the product with flashy graphics and product features means you’re not paying attention to the consumer’s needs or pain points. Such package designs are very bad. A decent amount of research is required to design any product package, which ideally cuts down on unnecessary information and material wastage. Sometimes, you only need to target a single pain point with your package design and that’d be appreciated more.

Enter User Experience (UX) Design

The industry is fast-moving towards user experience design from typical package design. There’s still time to get in on it. User experience design means designing the packages from the consumer’s point of view and not the sellers.

This consumer-centric approach enables package designs to function better. It’s important to convey your brand message and talk about your product’s clear advantages, competencies, features, or USPs. But all of this should be done from the user’s perspective.

Creating package designs that connect with consumers is the first step to winning more consumers and selling more.

The “Design to Price” Connection

A common mistake that many companies make is creating package designs that are not up to the mark given the price point of the product. Especially true for luxury products, when a consumer feels that he or she is paying more than warranted for quality assurance but getting a cheap or flimsy package design or packaging in general, it hurts not only your product sales but the brand value as well.

It’s very important to determine the correct package design as per the price point. Additionally, designing the packaging with the target consumer in mind is critical. If the target consumer is buying for quality, the design needs to be different than if they were buying for cost-effectiveness, for example.

If the quality or the level of the package design doesn’t resonate with the buyer’s intent or doesn’t aid the justification of the price, then this is a huge problem.

The most reliable way to get rid of this common mistake (and a few others) is to invest properly in user testing. You need to have valuable insights on the product’s package design, especially how it sentimentally affects a potential consumer before it hits the market.

Hopefully, this market testing coupled with extensive market research beforehand will enable you to produce package designs that resonate well with the target groups.