Assessing the Strength of Your Brand Package
In our previous newsletters on the topic of “How is Your Brand?” we gave you some homework to evaluate the health of your brand and offered tools to develop a relevant brand strategy based on your business objectives. The next step in our brand development process is assessing the strength of your brand’s package to ensure that your package is a natural extension of your brand and communicates your brand story.

A brand’s package must quickly convey the brand’s personality, promise, unique position and look, preferably in the few seconds it takes a customer to scan a shelf. Of all the different touch points for telling the brand story, the package is the most engaging because it can hit all the senses and draw in the customer. The package is the ultimate test of a brand’s survivability and sustainability.

The brand package should clearly communicate and connect with your core market. More than simply capturing a customer’s attention, a package must engage their emotions by contributing to an authentic, meaningful and memorable brand story to create sustaining power. To achieve this, brands need to focus on customer psychographics rather than their demographics to know why customers buy, and to learn their values and attitudes. They need to get to the emotions and rationalizations behind why people purchase rather than what population group they represent. The package needs to speak to their lifestyle, even help solidify the mindset they use to judge the category. A package is merely a commodity if it doesn’t create a memorable experience with the customer.

Put your package to the test
So how do you know if your packaging is properly representing your brand strategy and fully connecting with your customer? As customers weigh their choices, it ultimately comes down to being able to tell a compelling brand story through packaging and presentation. Once engaged, customers will find every reason to make that brand part of their lifestyle.

Evaluating the strength and relevance of your brand’s package
7 questions, 7 minutes and you can give your brand package a quick diagnosis. Answer each question on a scale of 0–5, with 5 being “I strongly agree” and 0 being “I strongly disagree.”

So, how do you score our Little Bug frozen baby food redesign?
Insights from Brand Engine revealed that the original design did not communicate their core values and lacked a strong brand position. After defining Little Bug’s key qualities and brand story, Brand Engine utilized these differentiators to convey a meaningful story on package:

• The strong green background color, symbolizing the natural land connection and short-farm-to-table approach, is distinct and ownable in the freezer section.
• The illustrative “window-like” bull’s-eye treatment, representing the one pure ingredient, appeals to multiple senses, inviting you to touch and smell the fruit.
• The clean and simple design uniquely positions Little Bug in its category.
• The brand identity expresses the brand personality, targeting mothers looking for wholesome choices for their children.
• The kraft box is a unique material, fully recyclable and an eco-friendly choice for moms and their babies, supporting their values of sustainability.

If you didn’t have the opportunity to evaluate the health of your brand from previous newsletters, click here to take our brand evaluation quiz.

This entry was posted by Will Burke on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Branding, Change the Conversation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.