Best packaging design principles for the technology market

By Tim Robertson RGD

Competition at the retail level of software and technology sales is intense. Major software and electronics merchants carry numerous products in a cluttered (and often, very noisy) retail store environment. It’s important to ensure that your product gets noticed when situated alongside competing brands.

Too often, a product fails to produce results not because it is functionally deficient, but because the product’s package design is ineffective in communicating brand value and a clear benefit.

Wharton School and Perception Research have shown that over 50% of purchase decisions are made at the shelf, in spite of all the brand awareness and advertising marketers may have done in other media!

When considering how to market your product in retail, consider the following five strategies of successful product marketing in software and technology.

1. Clearly Communicating the Benefit
A common mistake in software and technology marketing is an attempt to make every product appeal to every consumer. The product package design will mix messaging intended to appeal to less sophisticated consumers with highly technical language intended to speak to those with more expertise. The result is a package which is trying to communicate “everything”.

All products have a scope of consumer relevance, and very few products possess a genuinely universal application. The most direct way to deliver a product’s relevance to consumers is to tell them whether it will work with the system they already have, whether it will produce the result they want, and how the product has been proved or certified.

2. Providing a Consistent Brand Message
Television, print, and product package design architecture need to convey the same emotional and visual information. Often these separate mediums are visually inconsistent, dulling the focus of a comprehensive branding campaign.

As well, few consumers have the time or capacity to adequately sort through both master brands and sub-brands. Consistent branding requires that you maintain the centrality of the master brand, while remaining visually and linguistically consistent between disparate levels of marketing.

3. Rely on A Use-Based Differentiation Scheme
Avoid using context-free evaluation hierarchies to distinguish a product from other products in the category, and from competing commodities. Research strongly indicates that adopting a use-based differentiation scheme (e.g. ‘Personal’, ‘Home Office’, ‘Professional’) avoids the pitfalls of context-free evaluation hierarchies, and communicates to consumers which product will deliver the results they are looking for.

4. Invest in Effective Package Design Research
Out-dated focus group techniques are ineffective in detecting effective package design. Invest in research that is based on buying behavior and contextual comparison. This type of research not only compares brand perception and consumer behavior, it studies the impact of contrast and structural innovation in relevant retail settings.

5. Invest in Effective Package Design
Packaging that does not communicate a clear benefit quickly will not be considered. Inconsistent branding will confuse and detract from percieved value. And something as simple as the quality and craftsmanship of a product’s packaging is viewed by consumers as a reflection of the value of the product itself.

The retail environment is a comparative one where the competition sits side by side in a cluttered marketplace. A product package design that is well-researched and communicates its brand and benefit clearly increases the chances of a respectable ROI when it comes to development and design costs.

*Wharton School of Research

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