Vivablog

The key to a successful marketing or branding campaign starts with understanding your target audience, and, a well-defined audience begins with developing buyer personas. In the age of IG and e-commerce, your primary and secondary packaging design should most definitely be part of your CX process and strategy.

A buyer persona is defined as a well-developed character created from customer trends and demands. Most companies attract more than one group of people, so they find it beneficial to develop three-dimensional personalities with names, ages, occupations, certain social statuses, education levels, aesthetic principles, family size, buying trends, and more. Brands interact with people, not cardboard cutouts, so developing these personas are helpful to create a range of insights.

Simply put, developing personas is important, and it is incredible what insights surface when companies take the time to get to know them.

Personas and Packaging

When thinking about brand development and the multiple personas you must nurture, packaging becomes a primary touchpoint. Outside of the actual product, the package is the most tangible branding tool a business has, and these personalities can have a significant impact on your design strategy.

For example, if you’re targeting an older persona, you may want to work with more traditional packaging or play with nostalgic designs that tug at their heartstrings or work with packaging that can be repurposed. You also want to assess your font size and contrast and including smart and obvious ways to open the package for hands that have lost some dexterity.

If you’re going to attract a millennial persona, you may want to develop a more sustainable solution that works with contemporary or forward-looking design and trends. And be sure it has an element of IG-bait.

Packaging the same product in different ways can be a great way to embrace all of your personas without exclusion.

The Power of Personas

Once your business has developed well-rounded personas, what can you do with them? You can do anything! Hopefully, you use them to make every brand decision. Considering that it is the consumer that creates demand, it is essential that all marketing and branding strategies keep all personas in the forefront of every decision.

Consulting personas for insights into what your audience will identify with and what will capture their interest is essential to determining the shape, font, color, textures, and materials you use in your packaging design.

As you develop your packaging for your personas, don’t forget to measure your successes and room for improvement. Analyzing past data and current customer responses is a great way to test if your packaging ideas are meeting consumer standards and how they may be changing. Don’t let your personas get stagnant. They should be an ever-changing point of reference to keep your brand, and packaging, moving forward.