Achieve Sensory Branding Goals with Packaging

By most estimates, consumers experience roughly 3,000 ads per day, so they can become desensitized to typical marketing messages. Brand owners increasingly face the challenge of engaging their audience with something new. One strategy? Adding sensory branding. It’s about designing for the senses, enveloping consumers in a complete brand experience to create the right perceptions for a product or service. While traditional ad messages rely on visuals to showcase a product, sensory branding strategies depend on touch, sound, smell and taste.

What’s the connection between sensory branding and packaging? A user’s experience of touch, sight and sound can generate perceptions of importance, quality and monetary worth when engaging with a product’s package. In most cases, a package is the first point of contact consumers have when evaluating a product. Price can signal quality, but consumers often need additional subconscious cues to confirm a product is worth their consideration. When designing luxury packaging that appeals to the most discerning of consumers, material selection is one way to trigger implicit notions of a brand or product.  

Consider a bottle closure. A weighted closure’s sensation of heaviness and deep-pitched sound when set on a surface can shape a consumer’s perception of that product as high quality and premium. The presence of weight in packaging can invoke those feelings of importance and seriousness that a luxury product should have. 

Materials and color can convey luxury and sophistication to an audience. Some manufacturers are choosing polymer-metal composites that provide the equivalent weight of metal, but also allow for the design freedom provided by thermoplastics. For applications ranging from luxury spirits to cosmetics closures, these high-density filled polymers offer chemical resistance, customizable density and flexibility, and ease of processing.