---
title: "Why Products Don't Sell: A Packaging Perspective"
description: "Packaging is a crucial medium for communicating with consumers, and design must provide a reason to buy. This article outlines eight key points for creating effective packaging that drives sales, including distinctiveness, usability, memorability, avoiding information overload, and conveying value."
author: "赵波"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2023-01-13"
language: "en"
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# Why Products Don't Sell: A Packaging Perspective

> Packaging is a crucial medium for communicating with consumers, and design must provide a reason to buy. This article outlines eight key points for creating effective packaging that drives sales, including distinctiveness, usability, memorability, avoiding information overload, and conveying value.

**Introduction: As an important medium for communicating with consumers, packaging design must provide a reason to buy.**

Product packaging needs to be directional. I am often asked: "What do you think of this product I made? Will it sell well?" When asked why they made this product, many people will talk endlessly about their logic: some have sentiment, some have ideals, some have resources, some see market opportunities, some have hobbies, and some have discovered consumer needs. Most entrepreneurs make these products hastily based on subjective intuition, plus some trend data from Tmall and Taobao. However, when truly probing the deep needs of consumers purchasing this product, I find that many people rarely think from the fundamental starting point of marketing. What starting point? Why consumers buy this product.

You might say: "That's simple. Consumers have needs, my product is delicious enough, my packaging is beautiful enough, my price is cheap enough..." If I said that all of this is correct, but most of the time it might not be, what would you think? The outer packaging of a product is the first and most important step for consumers to perceive the product at a physical level. In an environment without advertising support, to make a product discovered by consumers on a dazzling shelf, and to make them like it and think it is exactly what they want in a very short time, places extremely high demands on product packaging design. A typical characteristic of FMCG is repeat purchase, so packaging is the element with the highest frequency and opportunity for contact between consumers and the product. For a product, packaging becomes one of the important media for communicating with consumers. Mr. Hua Shan said: "Packaging is meta-media." I strongly agree. The expression of product packaging is a key factor in making consumers buy and continue to buy. Good packaging design includes many factors, but these elements all have clear direction. We see too many product packages that overemphasize aesthetic expression, neglecting the transmission of product information. Some product packages have information overload, causing consumers to fail to remember the product's features. 

**Eight Key Points for Shaping Consumer Purchase Reasons**

I have summarized the defects and shortcomings of product packaging currently visible on the market into eight issues:

1. **Distinctiveness**: When consumers walk past shelves and scan products, the time left for each brand is generally no more than 0.2 seconds. In that instant, to attract consumers' attention, product distinctiveness is very important. However, we see many online products that are not effectively differentiated from offline products. On online electronic shelves, products are independent posters with exquisite design, but once such products are placed on a dazzling supermarket shelf, they are instantly submerged. Such brands often overemphasize the aesthetic expression of packaging, but the category characteristics are not prominent, ignoring that different shelves require different packaging designs. Moreover, they do not specifically design and display for the competitive display characteristics of offline shelves. Offline products not only need to be exquisitely designed, but also need to place different specifications and packages in specific product display areas to evaluate whether the product will be submerged, the recognition of the product's main color, category, and logo, etc. This requires the product to be bright and eye-catching, allowing consumers to identify it at a glance among many products.

2. **Usability**: The usability of a product is a core factor in whether consumers repurchase. Some humanized designs can easily move consumers and make them repurchase. Some entrepreneurs over-package to emphasize their product design concept, resulting in cumbersome opening processes, like buying a box and returning the pearl. Some product packaging designs even have defects, causing splashing or scattering during use; or some natural design flaws are due to not considering the consumer's usage scenario during design. In fact, many new products on the market have usability issues. These issues are very worthy of attention.

3. **Memorability**: Whether a product can be remembered by consumers and repurchased, in addition to the quality of the product itself, the core is whether the product has a memorable point at the copywriting level that consumers can remember. Of course, brand is the best way for users to remember, but what distinctive feature a product can have for consumers to remember can be said to add a double buff to the product. However, we see too many products where at a glance you don't know what special function the product has; what it has, others also have, without highlighting the differentiated selling point, and there is no consumer memory point. Note that memorability is not distinctiveness; it is the difference from other products within the category, and what the consumer's memory point is. If distinctiveness is to let consumers take a look at you in the vast crowd, then memorability is what remains in their mind after that look or after holding it in their hands and examining it.

4. **Avoid Information Redundancy**: To make consumers remember, less is more, highlight key points, and emphasize selling points. This is basic common sense, but often many decision-makers want to express too much when designing products. In the limited display area of product packaging, they stuff too much content, without focus, even information overload, making the packaging flashy and confusing consumers about what the product is for. I remember when I worked at Taishan Beer, the earliest slogan for Taishan Original was: "Contains yeast, all malt, unfiltered, fresh in 7 days," but consumers couldn't remember it. In Jinan, consumers habitually called Taishan Original "7-day fresh," and in Beijing, they called it "Big 7." What does this show? What you want to tell consumers is not necessarily what consumers want to know. We need to stand from the consumer's perspective; what this product does is the most important.

5. **Value Point**: The value point is to inform and support why this product is so special and why it is so expensive through cases and content. This value point can be category, origin, scarcity, or uniqueness. This sense of value is the most important core supporting the product price and needs to be perceived by consumers. However, we see many brands neglecting the creation of a sense of value in their product appeals, thinking that as long as they have a beautiful and high-end package, the product has a sense of value, but that is not the case. The sense of value is rooted in the consumer's cultural matrix, their judgment and understanding of things. This sense of value must have a basis, logic, and conform to consumers' value perception of the product, not simply expressing "I am expensive." Only when consumers feel you are expensive are you truly expensive.


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