Packaging stickers and labels are an essential part of memorable branding for your business. Since visual learners comprise 65% of the population, addressing their need for eye-popping visuals can help your company attract new customers and retain the ones you already have.
Each component of visual branding contributes to the overall look and feel of a brand. It starts with packaging stickers and labels for branding. After all, an attractive label is often the first thing that causes a customer to reach for your product on the shelf.
Packaging stickers and labels for branding should “convey your brand personality,” Barker says, evoking an emotional response from customers who see them. Making sure that the visuals on your packaging match those on your other branding elements, such as your brochures, website, emails, and in-store signage, also ensures a seamless visual experience, keeping that emotional connection alive no matter where they encounter your brand.
Packaging stickers and labels for branding should also differentiate your brand from its competitors. Distinctive colors, a slogan that conveys your brand’s key differentiators in only a few words, and text in fonts immediately tell customers who you are and set you apart from your competitors.
For example, if you’ve visited your supermarket’s candy aisle lately, you’ll notice something about all the Snickers bars if you look hard enough. The marketing suits have replaced the Snickers name with words that mean “hungry,” yet have kept the fonts the same to ensure brand continuity. Genius move – and one that illustrates the need for a distinctive, coherent look.
Use Packaging Labels That Convey Quality
Yes, as Barker says, customers do indeed “judge the book by the cover.” If you skimp on quality when it comes to packaging labels, they’ll assume the same about your products and move on to another brand.
Be cute and playful with your packaging labels, if that’s your brand image. But never get sloppy.
However, if you sell luxury items, it’s especially critical to convey quality with the visual art and lettering on your packaging labels. If you don’t have a designer on your staff, your printer will certainly have a talented artist on their staff who can create the upscale visual tone your brand needs.
Focus on Your Customers as Well as Your Brand
Whatever your brand’s culture, it’s essential to focus on your customers as well when you create custom stickers and labels. Besides your brand values, your packaging should appeal to your target market.
Researching your social media and content analytics should help you discover exactly who is buying your products. Or, if you’re introducing a new product, these data will help you identify who has a keen interest in your products.
To help you sift through all the data, create buyer personas from your target audience. Usually, your prospective customers’ data will shake out into several groups, each with different needs, pain points, and demographic data.
Let’s say you make high-end women’s perfumes. The data shows the usual suspects: wealthy women 40 and upward, female up-and-comers who want to impress the C-suite, and of course, the husbands of those wealthy women – usually busy doctors, who struggle to remember their anniversary, let alone remember their wives’ favorite perfume. However, a surprising demographic might emerge – college girls who want to ensure they get into a sorority and will do anything to impress their wannabe sisters.
List the characteristics of every target customer. Then look over their defining characteristics and give them an easy-to-remember name. That way, your design team will find it easier to come up with label designs that will appeal to all your target customers. In this case, you might choose:
- For the wealthy middle-aged customers: Sophisticated Sophie
- For the upwardly mobile executives: Zip-to-the-Top Zipporah
- For the wealthy women’s husbands: Doctor Dan
- For the sorority pledge: Sorority Sally
The easier you make it for your marketing and design teams to identify your target customers, the more on-target their labeling, packaging, and messaging will be.
Let’s look at how better visual branding can help you create labels that will be more effective in attracting those market segments for two types of companies: food and beverage and retail, two industries in which mastering the visual is especially critical.
Custom Stickers for Food Packaging
Food and beverage packaging must create instant cravings in your customers. So, create custom stickers for food packaging that will bring on the crave. Whether it’s plump grapes dripping with juice or an image of a steaming plate of spaghetti, cater to the tastes of your target customers with stickers that convey the message that the food and drink inside the package will satisfy their cravings.
Using colors that stimulate the appetite is essential when designing custom stickers for food packaging. The top four colors for food branding are red, yellow, orange, and green.
Of course, you need to connect the food you’re marketing to the colors you use. For salad mixes, using green (and probably its complementary color red) in your custom stickers for food packaging will likely catch your target customers’ eyes. In fact, if you go to your local supermarket, you’ll likely find the top brands using exactly that color combination to sell their salad mixes.
Likewise, orange and yellow are fabulous choices for breakfast foods. But don’t take our word for it. Two of the nation’s top breakfast destinations – McDonald’s and Dunkin – feature these sunny colors in their visual branding and labeling.
Custom Stickers for Packaging Retail Products
As with food products, you’ll want your retail product imaging to reflect both your products’ characteristics and your target customers’ desires. Selling sexy lingerie? Then your custom stickers for packaging should reflect the passion you want to arouse in your customers.
Or, if you’re aiming for the high-end market, elegance should set apart your custom stickers for packaging. Rich purples, lush green colors, and golds combined with gorgeous images and simple, elegant fonts should adorn your stickers and labels.
When you align your brand, your products, and your customers’ interests into custom stickers for packaging that evokes desire, you’re in the sweet spot. With labels and stickers that reflect that focus, your products will likely leap off the shelves into your customers’ hands.
Visual branding also applies to how important store signage can be to a business.
For brand-forward custom stickers and labels that attract more customers, look no further than the label specialists at Nova Custom Label Printing. Contact the Nova team today!
