The look of a product can have a major impact on its sales.
A great deal of thought and planning goes into the physical appearance of products. Packaging design is an integral part of an advertising and marketing strategy. It is designed to appeal to a target market and to convince potential buyers that the product within the package will fulfill its claims to excellence. Advertising campaigns and packaging are designed in conjunction with each other for maximum promotional impact.
Innovation
Innovation is key to the success of both products and their packaging. In some cases, a new innovation will create a product that better fulfills a public need, while in other cases the innovation will occur purely within the realm of promotion, and the product will take off as a fad or in response to the public identification with a package or a commercial. The public is notoriously fickle, and innovative ideas will appeal to people's desire for novelty. The best innovations create products that are both useful and fun, the iPod being an extremely successful example.
Brand Clarity
One of the primary purposes of product and packaging design and advertising is to make a product stand out from its competition. Breakfast cereal is a representative example; the actual content of most breakfast cereals is nearly identical, but their packaging and target audiences can vary widely. Marketing teams engage with extensive research involving surveys and focus groups to determine what variation of popped corn or shredded wheat will resonate most strongly with a certain market subsection. They then create a brand image that they hope will be unique and stand out from the crowd while still falling within the parameters of public acceptability.
The Packaging
Packaging has become an art form in itself, and sometimes has more thought put into it than the product it contains. A beer can and a beer bottle with exactly the same beer in them will be marketed to, and will be popular with, entirely different groups of people. Cars with identical mechanical parts inside of them will be built with differently shaped or colored bodies and perceived by the public as entirely different. Packaging is, in effect, a language, and the public is taught the grammar of the language through constant exposure to advertising. Once they have learned the language, they engage with packaging by responding to it with their money.
The Product
In some cases, products are identical with their packaging -- for example, fashionable clothes, which are essentially packaging for the body. The smaller and less expensive commodities are, the more they are likely to be dominated by their packaging. Larger and more expensive consumer durables tend to give buyers a bit more pause, and buyers want to know that they are getting value for their money. A person who will buy a bag of chips solely because of the color of the bag will not buy a $1200 flat-screen TV because it's in a pretty box. The more expensive the product is, the larger percentage of the design budget goes to the product rather than the packaging.
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