Packaging Design: Successful Product Branding From Concept to Shelf, 2nd Edition

What Is Packaging Design?

Packaging design is the connection of form, structure, materials, color, imagery, typography, and regulatory information with ancillary design elements to make a product suitable for marketing. Its primary objective is to create a vehicle that serves to contain, protect, transport, dispense, store, identify, and distinguish a product in the marketplace. Ultimately, the goal of a packaging design is to meet marketing objectives by distinctively communicating a consumer product's personality or function and generating a sale.

There are tens of thousands of different products lining the shelves of the average supermarket. Department stores, mass merchandisers, specialty stores, outlets, and the Internet are all retail marketing sites where products are brought to life and attract consumers through their packaging design. The vastness of consumer choice brings about product competition that, in turn, fosters the need for market distinction and differentiation. In a consumer society, products and the design of their packaging become so intertwined that they are no longer perceived as either separate objects—or, ultimately, objects of necessity. Successful packaging design, in fact, creates desire (fig. 2.1).

Planning, execution, pricing, placement, promotion, advertising, merchandising, distribution, and sales are all part of the mix of activities involved in moving goods from producer to consumer. Packaging design is one component of this multivariate series ...