If you are a product manufacturer dependent on distributors and retailers to connect end-users with your product, the packaging you design is one of your most important marketing elements. Particularly if target consumers don’t see your product as “brand new.”
Overview
Packaging is included as part of the expanded marketing mix because a well-packaged product that makes it from your business to the place of sale in “showroom” condition is of no value if the product it contains is purchased. Packaging is a marketing and sales concern because of its essential role in attracting attention and imparting point-of-sale product information to help trigger the decision to buy.
The general group of activities that concentrate on designing a package and producing an appropriate and attractive container or wrapper for the product needs to be a creative collaboration between marketing and operations. Operations need to ensure the product it produces will be adequately contained and protected and can cost-effectively insert the finished product into product packaging. Marketing is responsible for the other five elements of packaging related to product identification, display, promotion, description, and theft reduction.
If you are a product manufacturer dependent on distributors and retailers to connect end-users with your product, the packaging you design is one of your most important marketing elements. It is more than product protection and image. It’s about resellers, and customer convenience that makes the bigger difference between selling your product at a profit or not.
From an operations perspective, the primary purpose of packaging is to protect the product they produce from damage during transport, handling, and storage. Its purpose is to keep the product intact throughout its logistics travels from manufacturer to the end-user and can be specially designed to protect the product from external factors such as mishandling, humidity, light, heat, dirt, insects, dampness, and breakage.
If target consumers don’t see your product as “brand new,” yet you have improved your product to offer a better value, your optimum marketing lever is the new packaging. If you aren’t offering better value, then make it easy for distributors, resellers, and retailers to connect end-users with your product by making it easy for them to access, display, and resell your product.