Do you think about your product presentation?
A lot of small business owners & entrepreneurs don’t realize that the way a product is packaged represents their company as much as they and their employees do. When someone orders your product online, do you think about the presentation when they open it?
At Three Girls, we work with our clients to create Sample Packages that will impress the media because if a journalist isn’t impressed, why would they tell their readers to buy one? The same is true of customers – if they aren’t impressed, why would they tell their friends and family to buy one? Why would they come back and order from you again? Packaging can’t make a bad product good, but it can help a good product receive more attention and build brand awareness.
An article on PlugIn.com by Suzanne Rodriguez addressed this issue as well. Rodriguez gave an example of why an excellent product might be overlooked without a package that draws attention to itself:
Early one cold winter morning a couple of years ago, a young man clad in blue jeans, a baseball cap, and a long-sleeved T-shirt walked out of Washington, D. C.’s L’Enfant Plaza Metro station carrying a violin case. As if by long habit, he claimed a spot against a wall, opened the case, pulled out a violin, and placed the case open before him to collect money from rush-hour pedestrians exiting the subway and heading to work.
The man played away on his violin—all Bach pieces—for about 45 minutes. During that time, six people stopped to listen, most of them briefly; and 27 threw or placed money in the violin case. More than one thousand others walked by, most never slowing their pace or even glancing toward the musician. At the end, the young man gathered the $32.17 he’d collected, carefully secured the violin in its case, and walked away.
What makes this subway busker story interesting is this: the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most acclaimed classical musicians. The Bach pieces he played included Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor, considered by Bell to be “one of the greatest pieces of music ever written;” experts agree that it’s also one of the most difficult of all violin pieces to play. As to the violin used that day, it was Bell’s own: a 300-year-old “Golden Age” Stradivarius known as the Gibson ex Huberman, it’s worth about $3.5 million.
That day Bell was participating in an experiment initiated by Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten. The event was videotaped, and Weingarten’s April 8 2007 provocative cover story about it, Pearls Before Breakfast, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Reporting.
Rodriguez sums up her point with:
In the best of all possible worlds, packaging wouldn’t matter. But we’re living in a less-than-perfect reality where sometimes it does matter. The right packaging can guide opinions and make something stand out from the crowd. The classic example of this is the classic blue box associated with Tiffany & Co since 1837. That “little blue box” is instantly recognizable. Empty boxes are sold on eBay, and Tiffany stores even guard against people sifting through the trash to find damaged boxes.
So how can you make sure your packaging is helping rather than hurting? Here are five tips Three Girls has to offer:
- Include concise information. We recommend one or two pages that answer your most common questions and direct the recipient to more information on your website.
- Don’t include unnecessary brochures or papers in the package. It can look cluttered and overwhelm consumers.
- Include colored tissue paper to add some color without excessive expense. A little tissue paper can go a long way in spicing up the visual appeal of a package.
- Make sure you include packaging materials to protect the product. Personally, I hate the packing peanuts because they get everywhere when the box is opened. Whatever you decide to use, think about what it will be like to open the box up.
- Be creative. You know your brand best, so think about what sort of packaging would support that brand to make it stronger for your consumers.
Photo Credit: Vanessa Yvonne