Is your brand missing connected packaging?

The landscape of retail as we know it is changing. Beautifully designed, well-made packaging will still help you stand out on the shelf, but brands are having to go above and beyond when it comes to enhancing the customer journey through their packaging.

Time to join the connected packaging revolution.

Cast your minds back to Coca-Cola’s ‘share a bottle with’ campaign. Consumers were searching high and low to find a bottle with their name on it, resulting in increased brand awareness and, critically, sales. The campaign was so successful, it landed 7 awards at the Cannes Lions festival. How? Through a clever combination of marketing prowess and a seemingly simple change to the packaging.

These days, connected packaging goes way beyond a uniquely labelled bottle. With QR codes providing access to apps, augmented reality and exclusive brand deals, packing has become about much more than simply housing and protecting your products.

Could your brand be missing a trick when it comes to these customer interactions? Let’s see how connected packaging can take your brand awareness to new heights.

How can you implement connected packaging for your brand?

When we think about connected packaging, it can be broken down into three main categories. You may choose to use one angle or a combination of the three.

Active packaging

Active packaging is normally used to tell your customers about your product. Generally, this will be done by redirecting them to informative content using a QR code.

You might direct them to a website, your social media channels or any incentives or competitions you may have on.

Interactive packaging

Interactive packaging takes your active packaging one step further. Where active packaging sends your customer to a static piece of content, interactive packaging is, well, just that, interactive.

Using QR codes or an RFID (radio-frequency identification), your packaging could lead them to the world of augmented reality, games, quizzes, forums – you name it. This approach can hugely widen your advertising real estate.

What can connected packaging do for your brand?

Brand loyalty

For any brand, customer loyalty is a key objective. If you can link your packaging to your loyalty scheme, it makes it easier for your customers to build up points and claim any rewards you may have.
The more incentives you offer, the more likely your customers are to come back to your products time and time again.

From a sustainability point of view, this also means you can reduce the amount of printed loyalty cards you need to produce. After all, how often do customers remember to bring cards with them? If they can access your loyalty scheme through their mobile phone, they’re more likely to engage with it, increasing your brand awareness and engagement. Everybody wins.

Improved customer engagement

Once you can use your packaging as a gateway to all the other things your brand has to offer, customer engagement will reach a whole new level.

Here’s your chance to get really creative with showing how your brand adds value outside of simply providing a product. After all, we know consumer expectations from brands are higher than ever before. You might add value through providing recipes, activities, games, and augmented and virtual reality. As soon as you’re able to get your customers into the digital space, the sky really is the limit.

If, within your digital space, you’re then able to persuade your consumers to generate their own content raving about your brand, even better!

Real consumer behaviour insights

If you’ve successfully put intelligent packaging in place, you have a fantastic opportunity to improve your future offering by gathering direct insights and feedback from the people buying your products.

Feel more confident when launching new products or campaigns knowing that you’re speaking directly to consumer needs.

Stay ahead of the game

It’s currently predicted that as many as 64.89 million Brits will be smartphone users by 2025. If your brand isn’t capitalising on that digital space, your competitors soon will be, and you may be missing out on opportunities to grow your consumer base.

Even the biggest well-known brands have to do what they can to stay relevant and modern. Look at Cadbury. Since their inception in 1824, the confectioners have gone through many an evolution – using their packaging to engage consumers with their products and campaigns. Their 2020 Valentine’s Day campaign was a perfect example.

Using a QR code, the receiver of the brand’s classic Milk Tray could watch a personalised video message from their sender. Not only were consumers enjoying the classic Cadbury chocolate they knew and loved, they were able to make the experience more three dimensional by adding a highly personal touch.

With the lines between conventional retail and the digital world becoming more and more intertwined, we can’t wait to see where connected packaging will go next.

As designers and guardians of packaging for some of the country’s best loved brands, we get excited about the industry’s most innovative technology to bring your customers an experience they’ll never forget.