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It can be challenging to get shoppers to notice your product in a crowded and competitive market. Understanding various strategies for creating eye-catching retail shelf packaging can improve shelf appeal and attract more customers. Learn actionable tips to make your product stand out on the shelves in a crowded marketplace.
What Is Shelf Appeal?
Shelf appeal refers to how attractive consumers find a product when it’s on the shelf. Many factors affect a product’s overall shelf appeal, including where it’s placed on the shelf, what surrounds it, the lighting and the packaging.
How Packaging Affects Shelf Appeal
Retailers decide how to place your product on their shelves, so the factor you have the most control over is the packaging. Shelf packaging design is about more than making a product look good — it’s about communicating the item’s quality and value at a glance. Effective packaging draws in consumers, clearly explaining what your product is and how it will help them.
10 Packaging Strategies for Maximizing Shelf Appeal
Compelling packaging combines an aesthetic appeal, brand identity, and an understanding of consumer preferences and market trends. As market preferences change, your packaging should also change. Using an interactive process of feedback and testing can help you find the most effective combination for your product. Here are 10 strategies to make the most of your packaging:
1. Understand Your Target Audience
To appeal to your target audience, you must understand their wants and needs. Your packaging should resonate with their preferences, values and shopping habits. Research their pain points and desires to create packaging that shows how your product solves a problem or fulfills a need. It may be helpful to create one or more personas to represent your audience. Perhaps your ideal customer is a wealthy lawyer who wants a minimalist item that provides a premium experience.
2. Make the Packaging Visually Appealing
Your packaging should improve product shelf appeal and be visually pleasing to capture consumer attention. Considering your target audience, create a design that speaks to them, whether that’s bright colors with high energy or a muted, refined palette. Choose colors, fonts and images carefully to embody your product’s value, and use white space to help key elements stand out. Be sure to include your logo and highlight your product’s specific features.
3. Apply Color Psychology
Colors can hold strong, subconscious meanings and can affect moods or provoke a subtle emotional response in consumers. Be aware of the positive and negative emotions people often associate with particular colors to convey the appropriate message with your packaging:
- Red: Passion, love, excitement, boldness, confidence, active
- Orange: Warmth, kindness, creativity, happiness, affordability
- Yellow: Hope, joy, danger, risk, curiosity
- Green: Nature, growth, contentment, freshness, healing, renewal
- Blue: Wisdom, reason, peace, stability, safety, water, calmness
- Purple: Nobility, glamour, sophistication, regality
- Pink: Softness, reserved, femininity, love, delicateness
- White: Relief, truth, modernism, cleanliness, purity
- Brown: Earthy, natural, utility, construction
- Black: Mysteriousness, cold, sadness, powerful
Understand the subtle differences as well. While silver products can be seen as innovative, modern and cutting-edge, gray is a subdued color that reflects a desire to blend in and may be viewed as boring compared to shiny silver.
4. Place Important Information Prominently
Arrange information thoughtfully, ensuring the most details are easy to find. It should be obvious what the product is and what brand it is. Other useful information includes benefits and features. Often, less is more. Rather than crowding your packaging with bold colors and every perk your product offers, focus on the most significant features. Text should be easy to read and not overly decorative to the point of illegibility.
5. Incorporate Interactive Labels
If you have a lot of information to relay about your product, consider using interactive or smart labels. To keep the packaging simple, add a QR code on the back that takes potential customers to a product page or video explaining how the product works, what it does or how to use it.
6. Connect to Your Brand Identity
Your packaging may be the first impression consumers have of your brand, and it should communicate your values and selling points. It should include your logo and a sense of consistency across products, even if you have varying colors or fonts for different varieties. Ensuring packaging cohesion improves brand recognition and builds trust with shoppers, leading to repeat purchases.
7. Adopt Sustainable Packaging
Consumers are growing more interested in sustainability, with younger people more likely to be conscious of their environmental impact. Even if you’re targeting an older audience, using sustainable or eco-friendly packaging can provide several benefits:
- Protects the environment
- Reduces your company’s carbon footprint
- Encourages recycling and reuse
- Improves productivity
- Increases brand loyalty
Eco-friendly packaging can be recyclable, reusable, made of post-consumer waste or other recycled materials, or simply use less packaging than similar products.
8. Consider Shelf Placement
Think about how your product will be displayed in its retail environment. If you can, work with retailers to optimize visual merchandising with optimal placement at eye level and multiple facings — the number of times the product appears on a shelf — or brand blocking — multiple product types from the same brand grouped together. Endcaps can be especially valuable spaces to encourage impulse shopping.
9. Leverage Seasonal Packaging
Holiday or limited-edition packaging can increase visibility, even if your product is surrounded by other festive-themed packaging. Seasonal packaging can also increase brand recognition and anticipation if consumers know you release something new every year. Holiday packaging helps your brand connect with customers and can increase sales if it inspires shoppers to treat themselves or purchase a gift for someone else.
10. Use Custom Packaging
Customize your packaging to ensure it suits your product and keeps it safe during transport. Whether you need a unique protective solution or want to create a luxurious unboxing experience, a custom packaging manufacturer can provide appealing packaging that fits your product, reflects your brand identity and incorporates innovative designs.
Trust Great Northern Packaging for Packaging With Shelf Appeal
If your business is looking for custom packaging, Great Northern Packaging is the solution. We provide innovative and cost-effective packaging options and work with you to ensure we meet your needs during every step of the process, from design and testing to manufacturing and printing. We take representing your brand seriously and pride ourselves on being a reliable packaging partner for our clients. Reach out to a representative today or learn more about our consumer packaging solutions.
