The packaging and labelling are the consumer’s first encounter with your product and brand. Ensure that the design of both these elements grabs your customer's attention in a way that influences the mental process needed to drive purchase intent.
Your packaging and labels should reflect the emotional attachment you want your customers to connect with your product. That is why you need a strategic plan for what your product should convey to the customer.
Sensory marketing or branding is a marketing technique that aims to seduce the consumer by triggering their senses to influence emotions and behaviour. That's why label design is one of the determining factors for whether a consumer chooses to make a purchase or not.
First and foremost, you need to have a clear vision of what you want your product label to express. That way, potential buyers browsing their options can categorize your product quickly.
These are all impressions you have the opportunity to control through the label by using the principles behind sensory marketing.
Read more: How to design attention-grabbing labels and packaging
"Neural Correlates of Impulsive Buying Tendencies during Perception of Product Packaging" is an exciting study that shows precisely how product decoration either triggers the brain's reward centre or its regions associated with negative emotions. The results show that product decoration can lead to impulsive purchases – even if the customer didn't intend to buy anything at all.
Two label design elements work particularly well in terms of controlling these processes:
They do so as they affect the senses of vision and touch.
Colours significantly impact behaviour and cognitive processes, but the effect goes beyond that. Research shows that approximately 62-90 per cent of the buyer's decision-making process is based on colour alone. Moreover, different colours each have strong symbolism here in India. In many cases, they are assigned religious or cultural meanings.
To date, there are no studies on the exact emotions that different colours tend to evoke.
Nevertheless, the marketing and design industry recognizes certain local theories about what the different colours express to the buyer about the product and your brand – and how the buyer might feel when using the product:
The two marketing elites, Lawrence Williams and Joshua Ackerman, said it well in their Harvard Business Review article "Please Touch the Merchandise":
"Physically holding products can create a sense of psychological ownership, driving must-have purchase decisions."
So, what does it take to make a consumer want to pick up and touch your product? The colour choice, communication and price may be enough, but what if the texture on the label itself could encourage physical touch?
If you want to improve on a standard label material, we have several strategic ways to tempt your customer:
Read more: Provide better customer experience through your labelling and packaging
Increased focus on the psychological aspect behind label and packaging design is a growing and exciting topic. While undoubtedly extensive, it's also a field of development that we in Skanem India have been involved in for decades – locally and internationally.
We get genuinely excited every time new and old clients, big or small, want to brainstorm with us to fulfil their label's true potential. After all – our goal is not merely to deliver your labels; we also want to make sure that your labels enable your products to sell – more.
Get in touch here and brainstorm design ideas with us!