Thursday 25 July 2013

Is Branding More Important than Customers' Needs?

During the process of designing and creating a Brand for products, many other factors take priority over what the customer would like.


For example, if a global company sells a range of beauty products, they would have to put specific information on the packaging for various countries, which means that the packaging may be larger and incur additional costs when multiplied by millions - what normally happens is that the font size used is as small as they can realistically manage. This makes choosing a new product off the shelf a very difficult task for people over middle-age, unless they are used to wearing their glasses on shopping trips.

Additionally, a super-chic brand likes to keep packaging uniform so that the brand is identifiable at a glance. If branding dictates that a box should be pink with red, white and blue polka-dots, customers can easily spot it amongst all the other brands.

However, when you take home your spotty boxes and throw them away, you are often left with identical product containers inside, with just the 8pt font to indicate whether it is night cream or day cream, eye make up remover or nail varnish remover.

Some companies get it right and consider the more mature client who uses the bathroom sans reading glasses - a dark blue label for night cream and a sunny yellow label for day cream with SPF 75 (possibly lobster red labelling for day cream with a low SPF? Haha!) These companies probably have a staff with mature ladies in positions of influence - even if it is the boss's wife!