Leverage Packaging – Physical and Digital – to Brand Your Small Business
Cats typically value boxes over the content that comes inside the boxes and we’ve all see the posts on Facebook that prove this fact.
As a small business owner, if you ship anything, you might want to adopt some of that “cat attitude.” I say this because I recently heard some interesting comments about the boxes that a small business is using to ship its merchandise.
The people who run this business display an incredible attention to detail and that goes all the way down to how items are shipped. The company has designed beautiful and sturdy boxes that feature its logo.
They look so good that people save the boxes. They use them around the house and they also save them to reuse later when they know they’ll be sending Christmas gifts, for example, to out-of-state family members and friends.
Every time a person sees one of these boxes, it helps brand the company. (Obviously a notion shared by Amazon.com!) And not only does the box “imprint” the company’s logo in the viewer’s brain, the quality of the box imparts a message as well.
A lesson for small business
Are you getting all the mileage you can out of your logo? This is one of the lessons small business owners need to learn from the global corporations. They treat their logos like royalty. They defend them from any incursion and they constantly put them on display.
If you create any packaging, you should consider stepping up your game a bit so it does more than move your product from Point A to Point B. If you think hard on the subject, you’ll probably remember some boxes or bags that you have reused over the years.
Of course, the classic cigar boxes are the greatest example of this. Today these are collectibles and can be worth several thousand dollars. I also remember little pouches that candy came in when we were children that we often reused for different purposes.
In addition to any physical packaging that you use, consider your digital packaging as well. Work hard to keep a consistent, branded look to all of your webpages, email and social media platforms.
When you look marvelous
When you do this, I think it does more than just keep your small business logo in front of potential customers, I also think it sends a subliminal message that says you business is real and that you take care of all the details. It gives a feeling of “consistency” and this is one of the main things people want to sense when they strike up a relationship with a new and so-far unfamiliar business.
If you carefully tend the image of your small business, it’s likely that you’ll give the same amount of care to your customers. The opposite is true also. If your branding is schizophrenic, people won’t know what to expect when they contact you…so they just won’t take that critical first step.
Image: “Cat in a Box,” © 2008 Peter Huys, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.