A few years ago, when I started studying packaging, my ideas on this job weren’t so clear as today. I missed several pieces and among them the most important were:
- The direct experience (to have built many packaging of success)
- The sensibility (to have refined my skills of choosing and evaluating
- The comparison
In short, I missed everything I needed to put on the market a packaging which is able to sell.
“What I remember I had since the beginning, it was a clear idea in my mind: I wanted to find an accurate formula, repeatable and of success to apply to the development of packaging”
I didn’t give up at the idea that good art Director or Designer did one good packaging out of five. I wandered: How is it possible?
I even didn’t know where to start, because when you have got little experience the question marks are too many. I didn’t give up and so I decided to do something which wouldn’t request me money, but just a lot of time and dedication.
Working double than normal hours, for days, months and at the end years I was able to take note of all the characteristics about most successful packaging, making in this way a personal handwork, a real database.
In this way I had at my disposal enough data to identify a repeatable and replicable matrix in my agency.
I was naive, but this was the first step which helped me to take action with the market.
The real quantum leap came when I started to practice and develop the first packagings of success, which were able to generate sales. I am speaking about a lot of sales for my customers.
In this way the first referrals (written and oral testimony) arrived from my customers.
However, I had a bigger problem: I wasn’t able to make replicable that success yet, I didn’t create a scalable process, even if I had understood some things, but my agency wasn’t autonomous yet.
In that moment I accelerated my research and my study of packaging of success.
I had at my disposal the right experience, the data I studied from Italian and foreign packagings of success and my power of observation had become more sensitive.
The context determines the success of the packaging
I had understood some really important things that I wouldn’t have been able to understand if I had limited myself to observe from the outside the success of products on the market.
I had understood three steps were the factors which influenced the success of package and my formula should have started from:
- Market segment
- The current situation of the market
- Competitors
Basically, a photo full of details. Looking at the packagings developed in my agency, I understood that the success was always linked to the job done to determine precisely the positioning of the package related to the ones of the competitors. Now it is clear: the more the development of packaging started from the analysis of competitor, the more the product generated success in sales.
I didn’t work to make a beautiful aesthetically packaging, but to make the most advantageous positioning of the market.
Considering the context, of the weakness of competitors and the area of attack which are not used, I could have identified the formula of success. And I did it.
We were making packagings of success at the agency, but in particular we placed them in a specific position: the one which is more favorable at sales.
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At this point I resumed my old list of historical packaging and I analyzed them once more, this time taking into consideration the contest:
- Who the direct competitors were
- What they communicated
- What characterized that specific segment of the market
- Which was the profile of the average consumer
- The reason of the success of that product
What I discovered was incredible and it helped me to focus on that precise and scientific formula which I wanted to find since the beginning and that helped me to create a replicable process also without my presence: I finally realized myself as entrepreneur.
I gave a name to that formula: I called it Packaging Positioning® and also today I am sure that exist a better name for this kind of process doesn’t.
Today thanks to the Packaging Positioning® our agency develops packagings which are sold in Italy and in different parts of the world because the principle of this formula is universal.
In fact, in the aisle, in front of the shelf, customers are all the same.
Market can change, brand’s rules, but the mental reasoning of the customers in front of the packaging products are always the same.
For this reason a package developed by Packaging Positioning® rules is intended to create success in sales.
It happens because personal taste and aesthetic considerations are substituted by objective data and there is only one goal: facilitate the choice of the consumer, making our proposal the logic solution at their need.
This works for food products, cosmetic, beverage, traditional products and innovative products.
Customer’s eye reasons according to differences and seeing several proposals trying to identify the best answer to their needs.
This, if done in a scientific way, just like it happens in the development of a Packaging Positioning®, brings it to a surprising result.
An example? The tin boxes (see below) of Amaretti del Chiostro which are sold abroad.
In conclusion: when you think about the packaging is inevitable thinking about the graphic development, the style, the choice of the structure and the design, but all of them are secondary elements.
This was exactly my mistake of many years ago!
You need, first at all, a different approach which allows us to reason starting from the end: how can we be chosen by the customers? (it is the reason for which we work).
In this way, we put ourselves in their shoes, thinking about what they should see to choose our product and consequently we position it with structural, visual, materials and any necessary element to highlight the differences which will serve our purpose.
In this perspective, applying the Packaging Positioning™, takes with itself a unique opportunity of success for the small companies as well for the big ones.
If you are looking for a packaging able to do this for your products, the Packaging Positioning® can definitely help you and we are those who invented it.
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In 1996 enters in the world of marketing, in 1999 founded Ardigia Marketing Funzionale (Ardigia Functional Marketing), in 2013 founded Packaging in Italy, Design Agency for Packaging Positioning™