A Guide to Packaging and Branding Alignment

Packaging and branding are two essential facets of marketing that help businesses communicate their value to consumers. While these concepts are different and can’t be used interchangeably, they complement each other to ensure businesses market their products effectively.

Below, we discuss the main differences, how the two concepts relate and why it’s important to align product packaging with brand identity.

Understanding Packaging and Branding

Branding and packaging collectively determine the success of brand promotion efforts. Let’s explore their distinctions and how they relate.

What Is Packaging?

Packaging represents the first physical touchpoint for consumers. It’s the outer shell that contains products and protects them from damage during distribution, storage and display. Being the first point of interaction with customers, packaging plays many important roles, including:

  • Attracting clients to the products, whether online or on retail shelves.
  • Establishing brand identity by communicating the brand’s quality and values.
  • Providing essential product information, such as composition, nutritional value, manufacturing and expiration dates.

What Is Branding?

Branding involves infusing your company’s values and messaging into packaging and other marketing materials. Its goal is to give your company, products and services a distinct identity that differentiates you in the marketplace and attracts customers.

It includes all the features that make up brand aesthetics, like logo, name, color schemes, voice, slogan and typography. Branding is a continuous process that helps establish trust and loyalty among clients by consistently influencing the look and feel of products.

Relationship Between Packaging and Branding

While branding and packaging have distinct features, purposes and benefits, they work hand in hand to promote products. While businesses use packaging to attract customers and contain the products, branding enhances the consumer’s experience by establishing long-term associations.

Branding represents the visual identity of a business that’s included in product packaging to convey the company’s personality and emphasize strategic alignment. Packaging should always complement the business’s branding and brand messaging.

Let’s look at the well-known brand Coca-Cola as an example. Its packaging design incorporates a unique contoured bottle shape, along with a red and white color scheme to reinforce brand recognition. The bottle’s labeling conveys the company’s recognizable logo, promotional messaging and basic nutritional information.

This packaging design works in tandem with the brand’s identity, often featuring slogans or images that evoke feelings of pleasure, friendship and happiness to align with the brand’s core message. The packaging uses a distinctive combination of branding elements like shape and color. This allows the product to stand out on shelves, ensuring customers can easily identify it wherever they see it.

The Importance of Branding and Packaging Alignment

Brand alignment ensures consistency with your company communications and visual elements across all channels. It makes your brand recognizable and builds trust, which ensures people recognize your brand easily, understand your purpose and promote it. Aligning your packaging with brand identity provides a superior customer experience by delivering the following benefits.

1. Achieving a Consistent Brand Identity

Brand identity encompasses the elements that influence a brand’s personality and differentiate it from competitors. Consistent packaging and brand identity are achieved by incorporating key brand elements like color schemes, visual identity and typography into your product packaging.

These should all match your brand’s voice and tone. This cohesion creates an emotional connection with your target audience and reinforces your brand’s story.

2. Establishing Customer Trust and Recognition

Aligning your branding and packaging enhances brand recognition by ensuring consistency across all communication channels and markets. It also helps you provide a superior customer experience by creating a memorable unboxing experience, which is key to developing customer trust and loyalty. Trust and brand recognition go a long way in retaining customers by enhancing reputation, retention and credibility.

3. Differentiating Your Brand From Competitors

Product packaging should differentiate your products from competitors in online and physical markets. It should uniquely represent your brand and communicate its mission, vision and values. Branding and packaging alignment ensure your products stand out in the marketplace, creating long-term associations and building a positive reputation.

Key Elements of Packaging and Branding Alignment

Brand alignment focuses on a few key features, including:

  • Visual elements: Packaging and branding alignment involves using a cohesive visual language. It uses logos, typography, colors and graphics that accurately represent your brand and ensure consistency in their physical and virtual applications. Cohesive use of visual elements makes it easier for customers to recognize and engage with your brand.
  • Brand messaging: This refers to how your business delivers its unique value proposition. Alignment involves using consistent language and tone to deliver the same core message everywhere, including on packaging, your website, event marketing and social media. Inconsistent messaging across campaigns and platforms can disengage customers from your brand, potentially reducing credibility and trust.
  • Functional aspects: The quality of your branding and packaging will determine how your customers perceive your business. Simplistic and bland packaging may reflect negatively on the brand, and flimsy packaging doesn’t protect your products. High-quality packaging should be attractive, secure and efficient, all while clearly and precisely delivering the brand’s message.

Steps to Achieve Alignment

You can follow these best practices to achieve unity between your brand’s packaging and brand identity:

  1. Audit current branding and packaging: Auditing your current branding and packaging helps you identify gaps and opportunities that help bring your vision to life. Set objectives that align with your business’s strategy and help you achieve your marketing goals. Regular monitoring and adjusting of the branding and packaging helps your business scale.
  2. Develop a unified strategy: This involves applying your core brand elements accurately and uniformly, keeping your packaging on-brand. A unified strategy creates a connection by helping people understand the brand’s promise and purpose.
  3. Collaborate with designers and marketers: Ensuring that designers and marketers collaborate well makes it possible to tell a brand’s story accurately and helps consumers understand your brand. Marketers help the design team understand the target audience well so they can envision how to bring your vision to life.
  4. Test and iterate: Adapt your brand expression to your specific needs, preferences and contexts to ensure it works. Testing also provides an opportunity to determine what works and what doesn’t for your brand. You can continue implementing the strategies that work and omit the ones that don’t.

Great Northern Packaging Can Help Align Branding and Packaging

Great Northern Packaging is a reliable packaging provider that offers innovative and cost-effective solutions to optimize your supply chain. We manufacture sustainable packaging materials designed in functional styles to suit your needs, budget and project scope. Our solutions also help you align your branding with packaging to ensure your products stand out and are memorable for anyone who encounters them.

With our customer printing and packaging solutions, we’ll help you custom-fit your brand’s needs and objectives. Contact us today for more information about how we can help you align your brand’s packaging and branding.

 

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