The consumer product landscape is evolving rapidly. New products are landing on the shelves every day. There are new channels of distribution such as eCommerce and digital reselling. There is also an increase in third party manufacturing. All of this has been creating a need for businesses to enter the market faster.

Surprisingly, 75% of products fail to launch in time because of packaging related issues. More than 50% of products get delayed for more than two months. This can lead to annual revenue losses of 20-40% just on account of challenges related to packaging.

If we observe carefully, packaging is complicated and involves a lot of data capture. This data may include information ranging from understanding of the customer, product category and competition to product specifications, label information and brand collateral. Then we have to decide on various packaging formats and its key line dimensions (KLDs).

On the other hand, there are a lot of stakeholders that one needs to collaborate with to get the right packaging. These may involve the packaging consultants, legal counsel, design partners, printers and testing laboratories.

In a recent survey conducted by Bizongo, the four areas that causes maximum delays have been identified as: data discovery (10%), design realisation (30%), stakeholder management (27%) and inter and intra team collaboration (27%).

Data and Design realisation

Design can be impactful and faster if all the relevant information is shared at the beginning. The most critical design brief is its consumer, category and competition, often called as the 3C study.

Consumer study, which includes psychographic, demographic, socioeconomic deconstructing of the customer, focuses on studying the current and potential customers of a brand. This can help finding unmet needs of the customer and thereby opportunities for growth for the brand. Category or market understanding is analysing trends and gaps in market, which can create opportunities for brand’s growth. Studying competition involves identifying the competitor’s strategy, strengths and weaknesses in relation to the product.

A crucial aspect of packaging is logistics, protection and storage. We need to think not only how products are used by consumers, but also how it is stored on the shelves. The lesser room it takes per item, the cheaper and more practical the product will become to stack, store and transport.

Stakeholder management

Packaging design involves collaborating with teams over huge stacks of data. If we are doing this manually, it can lead to a lot of inefficiencies. The task can become more daunting if there are multiple SKU’s. There are many cloud-based project management tools such as Asana, Tello, and Basecamp, which can be used for managing the product launch project. As packaging design is quite complex, Bizongo has also made a customised tool called Artwork Flow, which is used for artwork management and approval. It has also developed various checklists for various stages of project workflow from date discovery to design realisation.

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(The data inputs for the article were collected by Shriya Shyam of Manipal Institute of Technology)