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Packaging as a Brand-Builder

Personnel, although valuable, are replaceable. But brands are meant to endure.

Sterling Anthony
Sterling Anthony

The most valuable assets for companies that market consumer packaged goods are their brands. A brand is composed of multiple components, including a name, symbols, warranties, perceptions, experiences, and expectations. In theory, packaging can be a brand-builder because it either communicates or shapes those components. To put theory into practice, packaging needs to be an integrated part of brand management, beginning at the concept stage and continuing throughout the life of the brand.

A company’s mission is its reason for existing. From it flows its goals. Achieving them is the purpose of the overall competitive strategy. Departmental strategies, in turn, need to collaborate in support of that overall competitive strategy. Given the unmatched value of brands and given packaging’s ability to build them, to think of one is to invoke the other.

The trade press does an excellent job in featuring companies that have used packaging to build brands. Such coverage seldom, if ever, details the underlying roadmap that the company followed. That’s understandable, since strategies are inherently secretive. Inquiring minds are relegated to knowing the results, but not how they were achieved, in terms of starts-and-stops, progress-and-setbacks, etc. One’s learning curve, however, can be supplemented with fundamentals and best practices, applicable to specific stages in the life of a brand.

First, there’s the brand launch. The associated product is supposed to satisfy a consumer need or want, yielding the owner an acceptable profit. Such implies that some market/consumer research has been performed. As a result, the brand-new brand should be simple to understand, relevant to the target consumer, and different (even if only by perception). Nothing else would make sense, given the risks and high failure rates associated with launches. A launch needs every assist available. And none is as versatile or impactful at the point-of-purchase as packaging.

Over time, a brand acquires equity and an identity with consumers, the type and breadth of which reflects the brand’s standing within its category. But for a brand to be timeless, it must keep up with the times across generations of consumers. Again, packaging plays a role, exemplified by such slogans as, “New look, same stain-fighting power.” It’s not only a reassurance to loyal users but also a courting of new users. The facelift, therefore, needs to retain features recognized by the former while incorporating features attractive to the latter.

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