Packaging – The Silent Salesman
With the rising trend of food delivery services such as FoodPanda, Deliveroo & Uber Eats, many eateries have begun utilising more creative packaging to better market their products and stand out from the crowd.
To keep up with hipster trends, many companies have begun to adopt distinctive packaging to differentiate themselves, like iced thai tea in an IV drip bag or meatballs in a bucket, and those products seemingly sell themselves through their unique packaging. Advertising through your packaging is a genius way of marketing your product with barely any effort at all. Nobody can look at a white background with green polka dots without thinking of Krispy Kreme, or a Baby Blue box without thinking of Tiffany & Co. It is important to have customised and recognisable branding to distinguish yourself from your competitors.
Styrofoam boxes, brown paper, leaky transparent containers are now a thing of the past. While coffee in a bag and fried hokkien mee wrapped in brown paper may be reminiscent of the past, many eateries and hawkers have realised that they’re not exactly the most practical. Your coffee scalds everything it touches and it is a bummer when you got nowhere to hang it. Your noodles somehow find a way to leak out of the brown paper, if the oil around it hasn’t already tainted the whole plastic bag. Now, you’ll find your coffee in a paper cup with a reseal-able lid, your takeaway pasta comes in handy microwave-able paper boxes.
In fact, we have realised that it has become increasingly beneficial and crucial for brands to utilise packaging to best sell their products. Be it in design, structure or material, many brands have begun to step up their packaging game.
Pizza boxes have always come in brown paper boxes. Over the years, brands have incorporated more colourful designs, incorporating themes to suit festivities and monumental events to make their packaging more exciting.
It’s no use having an amazing looking cake if it’s wrapped in a plain old white box. Your cake box needs to match the beauty that it wraps inside.
You rarely see the chicken rice wrapped in brown paper anymore. Many places have adopted using customised boxes with their unique branding design or microwaveable containers with multiple compartments.
Eateries have also begun tapping into the trend of teenagers posting everything online by printing their brand on the cups of their drinks, leading to free marketing and exposure.
Salads, besides being healthy, is one of the brightest coloured foods you will ever find. It is a waste to hide all that colour instead of letting them shine. Companies have realised this and now added a window onto their boxes to showcase the beauty of the salad.
The mooncake industry is one of the most competitive when it comes to packaging. It isn’t enough for mooncakes to come in a nicely designed box anymore. In recent years, mooncakes have been presented in boxes that resemble drawers, or can be made into lanterns.
In light of global warming, more companies have also begun using environmentally-friendly packaging options, such as brown kraft paper, corn ware, Wheat Fibre packaging, Bagasse packaging. These options may not allow for as much creative flair, but it definitely sends the message that you are a company that looks out for the environment to your customers.
Packaging may be something many overlook when it comes to selling a product, but sometimes, it can really make or break a product. Instead of channelling funds towards advertising, maybe we should all start looking into improving our packaging. With such fierce competition across all industries, it is important to leave a lasting impression with packaging.
As much as we should all not ‘judge a book by its cover’, we inexplicably do. Let your packaging be your silent salesman today.