"If you want customers to marvel at this moment and want to stop, you have to rely on eye-catching packaging." Shiren Sasada writes in his book, "The Design Power of 0.2 Seconds".
If you apply this theory to the popular tea industry, brands may not be able to rely on product packaging to grab attention. Obviously, tea drink packaging is more likely to be in clear plastic cups, which are hardly visually stunning.
But takeaway shopping bags are a different story.
Tea drink brand Hi-Tea had launched 11 different bags in 2019. Naixue No Tea ("Naixue"), in response to fans of the brand, has come out with an official video to show you how to get your own takeaway insulated bags - in addition to ordering takeout, you can also buy them directly from stores for $2 for a small bag and $4 for a medium one.
For these brands, the takeaway bag is more of a "mobile billboard" than just a way to carry their products. The logic is simple - if the shopping bag is designed to look good, the first time the consumer uses it, it has already had the effect of attracting attention; if it can be reused, then it expands the radius of communication of this design.
Market research firm Nielsen has found that a great outer packaging design can yield 50 times the ROI of a typical advertising campaign.
The key to achieving this is to create a design that catches the eye and presents the symbols of the brand itself.
Hi Tea designs different styles of packaging for different product lines. For example, for coffee products, Xi Cha uses classic red, white and blue elements, arranged in vertical lines on the cups and bags. While in the soy milk series, the use of ancient style illustrations to make a distinction, but also out of the matching ancient style canvas bags.
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When co-branding with other brands or doing themed activities, tea brands will also make different styles of packaging design according to the characteristics of the partner.
For example, Nachel and Vita Lemon Tea have co-branded a "Barely Lemon Bubble Tea", which adopts Vita Lemon Tea's classic yellow and green color scheme for its bottle packaging. And with QQ Star co-branding, the bottle will be designed in the shape of a milk bottle, the color scheme also combines the QQ Star's classic product colors, and select the June 1 Children's Day market.
Hi Tea's "Made in China" campaign, which was launched on National Day last year, also received positive reviews for its red and blue color scheme on cup covers, paper bags and peripheral products.
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Of course, all of these designs revolve around the visual tone already set by the brand.
Hi Tea's packaging design, on the other hand, will maintain eye-catching brand identifiers, such as the Hi Tea portrait logo and brand slogans, and then re-design the packaging visuals to match different product ideas.
While there are various creative ideas, the unchanging practice is to repeat the elements of Xi-Tea that have unity, interesting elements, and distinctive color lines to form a strong visual impact, increase memory points, and consolidate the brand's tone by strengthening the visual impression.
Neixue told Interface News that it will organize a set of unified design style and color system around keywords such as "beautiful," "warm," and "bright," and innovatively incorporate them into Theme scene illustrations will be extended to online graphic design and offline promotional materials, bags and cup covers, forming the "Naixue style".
In terms of color matching, the company will focus on warm tones and light colors to present a natural and comfortable feeling visually, while the theme will be more in line with the needs of product updates, brand planning, and holiday activities.
But no matter how fancy the packaging design is, it needs to have a kernel.
Hi Tea told Interfax News that the three are **** born: looking good, facilitating communication and maintaining brand tone. For any brand, product packaging is always to serve the product itself as a prerequisite, followed by meeting the preferences of the target group, which is also known as "good-looking"; the final communication effect is based on the two to play the results of the brand's influence.
In other words, most of the time when a brand seeks a packaging solution, the decision is not purely based on visual or aesthetic aspects, but rather on the development of the business competition or human environment to push forward.
The shopping bag is, in a way, just as important as the brand logo, and it can become a commercial symbol for a brand.
When someone mentions "IKEA" in front of you, you may not be able to immediately pop up its IKEA logo, but you can immediately recall the large blue shopping bag FRAKTA. IKEA's shopping bag seems to have become a trendy item, appearing in some of the trendy people's outfits. The idea of using the bag as a vehicle in different IKEA marketing campaigns is no longer a rare one.
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And shopping bags from luxury brands are equally classic.
The Louis Vuitton bags you see today, along with the cardboard boxes, are also the result of a deliberate decision by the brand, which decided to change its bags in 2016, when it teamed up with industrial designer Marc Newson to create a set of Safran Impérial (Royal Saffron) colorway bags. To this day, its shopping bags are one of the symbols of this luxury brand.
"We don't think packaging should be a time-sensitive fad, but rather a longer life cycle. Most of the time, packaging design for fashion brands is always a black and white color palette, so we wanted to make a change." Louis Vuitton chairman and chief executive Michael Burke said.
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However, fast-moving consumer brands such as Xicha and Naixue, whose unit prices are much lower compared to luxury goods, are the main drivers of commercial growth because of frequent consumer spending. So they need to launch new products as well as bags frequently to attract consumers' attention.
According to their respective 2019 year-end summaries, Xi Cha launched more than 240 new products last year, while Nai Xue even came out with thousands of new products last year due to its richer line of European bags. And in conjunction with some new products and cross-border collaborations, they synchronize their shopping bags with updates.
Sometimes, these brands also directly involve consumers in the design.
Xi Cha recently held a "Xi Cha Cup" event, in which customers designed their own cups, and people from different cultures contributed many wild ideas. Nesco has invited a number of young artists to design a humanistic "Nesco Hug Cup" for the brand. Perhaps asking young people "what do you like" is a good solution.