Storyboard18 | What’s in the packaging? How design makes a difference

Copy-led packaging can go a long way to tell your brand story well.

It’s been well established by numerous research studies, including those by BrandAsset Valuator, that strong brands drive business growth.

BrandAsset Valuator is WPP’s proprietary brand analytics platform and the largest global database of consumer perceptions of brands.

Byron Sharp in his book How Brands Grow speaks of mental and physical availability of your brand as important components of your brand’s success.

Physical availability has to do with distribution, placement on retail and online shelves and other factors. 

Mental availability, on the other hand, relates to how distinctive the image of your brand is in the minds of your consumers. 

According to Sharp, “Mental availability refers to the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations.  It depends on the quality and quantity of memory structures related to the brand.”

Fast growing direct-to-customer D2C brands in India have discovered the power of packaging in creating distinct brand imagery to drive differentiation in crowded categories. Packaging is an underleveraged but increasingly critical medium for making your brand stand out in the physical retail environment as well as on online shelves where the thumbnail can make or break your brand.  

Unique packaging has become a conversation starter with consumers, helping brands achieve faster fame and notoriety through word of mouth and word of eye, especially on social media platforms. 

Packaging is the brand and the brand is the packaging

Deb Mukherjee, founder of Ceres Foods Pvt. Ltd, says, “In the online space for D2C brands and cloud kitchens, packaging is the brand and the brand is the packaging.”

If you don’t get the packaging and the unboxing experience right, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of your customers, which even a high-quality product may not be able to compensate. 

Ceres Foods recently launched “MoiSoi” a line of "Oriental" sauces for the home cook. The packaging is bold, eye-catching and interactive. There is a recipe book with each jar and also a QR code which takes consumers to a playlist on Spotify to listen to while rustling up Hakka noodles and spicy Manchurian for the family.

The MoiSoi set of nine Oriental Sauces comes in a handy wooden box creating a wow unboxing experience at home, perfect for gifting.

MoiSoi's set of nine Oriental Sauces comes in a wooden box.

Bombay Sweet Shop is a D2C brand from Hunger Inc, the company behind popular restaurants like Bombay Canteen and O Pedro. The distinguishing beliefs of this brand are bringing back the magic of mithai, celebrating the diversity of Indian desserts and crafting new gifting traditions. Consumers adore not only their sweets but their very colourful, quirky boxes with exquisite illustrations. The mithai themselves have a very precise and uniform shape, elevating the overall aesthetic appeal. This distinctive visual language is carried across the entire packaging system. Even if you didn’t see the logo, you could spot a Bombay Sweets pack from a mile!

Bombay Sweet Shop modak box.

Sleepy Owl Coffee is a popular new age coffee brand. Look at the way they have used their scared asset, their logo, in a bold and singular way to create memorability and increase their mental availability. 

Nykaa has taken an interesting packaging approach for its colognes. They come in a crushed brown paper that can be upcycled. No plastic and it’s also reusable. 

Another example of reusable packaging is from True Fit Gourmet. Their food comes in high-quality gorgeous jars that make you want to hoard them.  What a lovely way to create conscious consumption and stand out from other restaurant brands. 

The structure of packaging can create talk value as well as well as reusability. Sepoy & Co tonic water bottles may find themselves as quirky flower vases in your home making them very Instagrammable. 

Mason & Co uses craft paper reflecting their sustainability promise. “It’s just simple unadulterated and sensible” according to a die-hard consumer of the brand.

Stranger &Sons gin kit.

Brands are also using packaging concepts to grow the brand in new formats. Take homegrown gin brand Stranger & Sons, for example. Their gin kits pairing gin and tonic water are a delight. You just need to add fresh ginger, lemon or anything else you like your gin with - how convenient for consumers.

Brands are leveraging storytelling on packs in different ways. The #IamAmazon stories campaign celebrates small business owners in a way hitherto unseen on the ordinary cardboard boxes, creating a greater emotional connect with the brand through the stories of the sellers. 

To tell your brand story well, copy-led packaging creates great impact. The Whole Truth bars illustrate how brands can use a distinct voice to create stand out and engage consumers. 

So, when you look at this array of examples, what do you think about your brand’s packaging? Is it distinctive? Does it tell a story? Is it useful to consumers? Is it using sacred assets to reinforce memory structures?  

How can you take a page from these new age D2C brands and leverage your packaging to create a distinctive brand image? 

Also read: D2C brands treble funding this year to $2 billion through 105 deals