The life of any company lies in the product/service that it sells. Not only is the product the underlying reason for the company’s existence, but it is also what forms the entire premise of the business industry. It’s an economic need of society, a way to balance the demand-supply equation. Whenever people need a product/service, there will be companies that produce that particular product/service, and hence the cycle will go on and on.
That is precisely why there has always been cut-throat competition between companies in contention for more and more customers. Not only do they want to bring in new customers, but they also want to retain their customers. The best and most effective way to ensure that is to either have a superior product or present your product/service in a better way than your competitor.
This is how advertising was born. Even if you’re the market leader in any category, you still need to present your product/service and keep it relevant in the minds of your customers. This is why brands spend billions of dollars each year on their marketing efforts. Premium packaging is a key element of those marketing efforts. But also, this raises an important question.
Is packaging really as important as the product? There are a lot of people who continue to present the argument that if you have the best product/service on the market, then customers will continue to use it regardless of how much or how little you market it. It’s a fair point, and under normal circumstances, it would probably be true as well. However, marketing is supposed to represent an exception to those normal circumstances. That is why having good packaging for your products can be necessary, especially eco-friendly options in the current world where sustainability is one of the driving forces in all industries. Companies are doing a big drive on sustainability, and the packaging of a product is a big part of that. Eco-friendly packaging also drives more people to buy a product due to the general sense of environmentalism in the air.
This shift is very clear in the beverage industry, where brands are moving away from plastic and back to traditional materials. Glass is a popular choice because it is easy to recycle and keeps the product fresh. Wineries, for example, rely heavily on high-quality wine glass bottles to protect their vintage while meeting green standards. Choosing the right weight of glass helps these businesses lower their carbon footprint during shipping. It shows that sustainable choices do not have to come at the expense of a premium look.
There are countless examples of how better products continue to lose out to comparatively inferior products based on how they’re presented to the public.
Consider the famous Marlboro Man campaign. It is routinely considered the turning point in the history of advertising and marketing. People tend to forget, but a key factor in transforming the public image of Marlboro cigarettes was the radically different packaging that Marlboro introduced. Most cigarettes used to be available in paper wraps; Marlboro introduced them in cigarette packs that have become the industry standard today. That one initiative was responsible for transforming the image and, more importantly, the sales of the Marlboro brand.
It’s also important to mention the fact that Camel cigarettes were the better product, but that one characteristic was vehemently incapable of helping it retain its position as the market leader.
There can never be a compromise on the product. It is the entire foundation upon which the product is built. But when two brands have products that are on par in terms of quality, then it’s the question of how well each brand presents its product. Let’s take another general example of tobacco that is sold, not as cigarettes, but as mini portion packs, or loose, processed tobacco leaves. While both come in tins or cans to hold them, it would not be a far stretch to say that people might prefer to buy cans with full-sized catch lids rather than those without them, since it can prove more helpful for them. How the can appears, at first glance, becomes a substantial factor in deciding which one will be bought.
The presentation, i.e., the packaging, is what leaves the first impression. Marlboro’s revolutionary cigarette packaging was revolutionary for its time, as it oozed the message of quality, while Camel’s paper packaging sent the same generic message that every other brand sent at the time.
If you want to further explore packaging services, you could visit the website of Impacked Packaging, which is an online marketplace for packaging businesses to promote their services. There, you can find various options suitable for your business products.
Today, brands have become tenfold as competitive as they were in those days. There are plenty of reasons for that. One of them is the fact that the sheer number of competitors has risen. All of these brands have their own distinct characteristics that they aim to serve to different audiences. It has similarly become even more important how brands present themselves in terms of packaging since it’s highly unlikely that potential customers will give them a second chance.
