How to Communicate Your Brand Identity Through Packaging

Strong branding in your packaging design is a top way to create a positive first impression, influence customer decisions, and create a strong brand identity. Packaging your products using high-quality materials and professional design services helps prospective customers connect with your product instantly.

Designing packaging that speaks to potential customers and reflects your brand identity is a must. That's why many brands turn to professionals to create stunning packaging that leaves a lasting impression.

1. Create a Clear and Consistent Brand Identity

You must establish a clear and consistent brand identity before jumping into packaging design. Creating a brand identity involves defining your brand including its mission, values, and target audience. This is a crucial step for any business as creating packaging that invokes an emotional response is only possible if you have a clear identity from which to work.

Take the following steps to create a unique brand identity:

Define Your Brand

Thinking about what motivated you to start your business will help you define your brand. Build your brand on what makes your business special and differentiates it from those of your competitors. Consider:

• Your brand's values and vibe: Packaging that aligns with values communicates a vibe about your brand and what you are trying to convey. In cannabis, that can be a wide berth. Some brands' values are sustainably focused. Others embrace their medical roots. Others pay homage to the past of cannabis life in America. However you define your brand, your packaging should communicate that vibe.
• Your target audience: Identify your ideal customers and learn about their needs and preferences. This may show up in some of the color choices, material choices, fonts, and other aspects of the packaging designed to get your target audiences’ attention. This could mean using more meme culture language in branding your products to cater to younger demographics or using certain high-end finishes to showcase yourself as a more premium product.
• Your brand mission and vision: Clearly articulate your company's purpose and goals. These can vary widely among companies, including for packaging. For some that may mean domestically sourcing to have high-end, limited runs. For others that may mean protecting margins and offshoring packaging. It could also mean sustainably sourcing packaging or working with upstart businesses because their mission and values align with yours.

Your packaging should communicate all of these elements to appeal to potential customers.

Develop a Strong Brand Voice

A brand voice is the unique personality and tone of voice that a brand uses to communicate with its audience. It's how a brand expresses itself through its words and visuals. Just as individuals have distinct personalities, brands have unique voices that differentiate them from competitors. 

A strong brand voice helps to establish a consistent tone and style for all your communications—including your packaging. It also creates clear and consistent messaging that resonates with your target audience.

Stop and Smell the Flower: Word Play and Strategic Typeface

The “Stop and Smell the Flower” brand clearly communicates its focus on the mindful, experiential, and artistic side of cannabis through the word play in its name and the flower-like curls on the typeface.

Build Brand Guidelines

The next step is to create a comprehensive brand style guide that outlines all the elements of your brand identity. This must include guidelines relevant to compliance with packaging and labeling regulations.

For example, cannabis packaging regulations in Maryland state that peel-and-reveal labels may be used to provide nutritional facts and information about non-cannabis ingredients in the product. However, warning statements, disclaimers, and the universal symbol must be printed on the outer marketing layer.

Share the brand guidelines with all employees and design professionals to ensure consistency.

2. Make Careful Design Choices

Packaging that tells a story is never the result of just throwing elements together. Your packaging must be planned from beginning to end to reflect what you want to communicate.

Create an Effective Logo

Creating an effective logo to be displayed on all of your packaging is essential for a strong brand identity. Many brands skip professionally designed logos in favor of homemade designs. However, homemade logos often lack the key design elements that attract customers.

The best logos will incorporate the following features:

• Simplicity: Simple logos are memorable and versatile. They avoid clutter and focus on the core elements of your brand. The Colorado cannabis brand Tastebudz’ logo is a perfect example of simplicity. It features the brand name underneath a simple black-and-white mountain design that “pops” even on black-and-white packaging.

• Relevance: The logo should be relevant to your brand's industry and target audience, and convey the essence of your brand's message. The Doritos logo, for example, features the triangular shape of a corn chip behind the brand name. This clearly communicates the brand’s flagship product.

• Memorability: A unique and distinctive logo is more likely to be remembered. The Nestlé logo is relatively complex and doesn’t directly evoke imagery of milk, coffee, or nutritional supplements. However, the parent bird and baby birds in a nest are so memorable that they are indelibly engraved in most people’s minds.
• Versatility: The logo should look good in various sizes and formats, including black and white. It should be adaptable to different applications, such as print and digital media. The three logos mentioned above are extremely versatile in that they are equally as effective in any size and on any medium.
• Timelessness: A timeless logo will withstand the test of time and avoid looking dated. Avoid trends that may quickly become obsolete. In the early 2000s, for example, brands including Pepsi, Google, BMW, and Apple experimented with 3-D elements in their logo designs. However, this trend didn’t last long and they all reverted back to 2-D designs for future logo iterations.

Choose a Color Palette

Use colors that align with your brand's personality and evoke the desired emotions. Your brand guidelines should establish your brand's color palette. This will guide your choices during packaging design.

Research has shown that customers notice color before analyzing visuals or reading text on packaging (page 12 of the PDF). This shows that color is the most important element of your packaging design.

Some states also have specific color requirements for the packaging of regulated products like cannabis. For example:

• Cannabis packaging in Rhode Island has thus far had to be printed in neutral colors. There is a proposed change to allow all but “neon” colors in cannabis packaging in RI.
• Cannabis packaging in Connecticut has to be opaque. Edibles packaging must be black and white.
• Massachusetts doesn’t allow the use of bright or “neon” colors in cannabis packaging (page 77 of the PDF).

The design of your packaging and logo must take color restrictions into account to ensure they pop and resonate in neutral tones, if this is a requirement in your state.

1904 Cannabis Co.: Minimalist Use of Color

1904 Cannabis Co. uses color sparingly to create a clean, modern aesthetic. This brand also avoids “neon” colors, making it compliant with the color-related packaging requirements established in Massachusetts and proposed for Rhode Island.

Umamii: Using Color to Communicate Product Quality

These Umamii boxes communicate quality through the use of purple with gold, deep-purple, and deep-pink foil lettering—a nod to their focus on small-batch production and premium products. The clean lettering with a wavy design on the “m”s communicates both modernity and creativity.

Typography

Choose typefaces and fonts that reflect your brand's voice and style. A professional in packaging design is well-placed to advise you on the fonts and colors you should use for textual elements. A professional designer will guide you through considerations including:

• Brand identity: Select typefaces that align with your brand's personality and messaging. For example, a playful brand might use a fun and quirky font, while a luxury brand might opt for a more elegant and sophisticated font. Stop and Smell the Flower and Umamii are excellent examples of the way brand identity can be communicated through typography.
• Readability: Ensure the font size is large and clear enough to be easily read from a distance.
• Packaging material: Consider the texture of the packaging material and choose fonts that complement it. The quality of the printing process will also affect the appearance of the font.

Make It Pop

Consider adding premium print elements to give your packaging a little something extra. For example, adding a hologram effect or a gloss finish elevates your packaging and helps it stand out from the crowd. Always ask for guidance from design professionals when adding extra design elements to ensure your packaging stays true to your brand identity.

Vert: Eye-Catching Holo Effects

This Vert label uses holo treatment to create raised metallic lettering that catches the light from all angles. The result is eye-catching, elegant, and modern.

3. Select the Right Packaging Materials

The right packaging materials for your product will offer practicality and style while aligning with your brand identity.

• Sustainability: Consider eco-friendly materials to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers.
• Durability: Choose materials that protect the product and withstand shipping and handling.
• Aesthetics: The material should complement your brand's image and enhance the overall look and feel of the packaging.
• Safety: The packaging materials should be food-safe for consumable products (a glass interior is a great option) and comply with packaging safety guidelines, including the applicable child-resistant packaging requirements for certain products.

4. Experiment with Different Shapes and Sizes

The shape and size of your packaging are key to its ability to stand out on the shelf and communicate your brand's identity. Unique shapes are typically eye-catching. However, you must balance innovation with functionality. 

Ensure the packaging is easy for customers to handle during use and is large enough to display essential information like product benefits and warnings, usage instructions, and ingredients. The packaging must also be easy for everyone along the supply chain to handle.

Express Your Brand Identity with Professional Packaging

Well-executed packaging is a powerful tool for communicating your brand identity. Aspects of your design including your typography, imagery, and colors all contribute to communicating your brand’s mission, values, and overall identity.

Stunning packaging design doesn’t only attract customers but also fosters brand loyalty and drives sales. Remember, your packaging is often the first interaction a customer has with your brand, so make it count.