Conversion Driven Packaging Design

Jordan Buckner: [00:00:00] If you're a CPG brand, your packaging has to do a lot of work for you. It's not just a container to hold your products, it's actually your salesperson online or on shelf in retail stores. When I launched my brand TeaSquares, I came out with this unique multi surf pouch for our essentially energy bars, and it did stand out, but really for all the wrong reasons.

Customers were confused by the packaging and our sales suffered, so we switched to single serve bars that align with the category norms and our sales improved significantly and all that came into play of really what makes a good CPG prep packaging, not just from a design perspective, but really one that will drive sales and drive conversion.

So for this conversation, I have invited on Sanders, who is the founder of NUEX Creative, and he and his team have a focus on design and packaging design, but with a lens of what's going to convert customers. Sanders, welcome onto the show today. 

Sanders: Welcome. Thanks for having me. Big fan of your show. So I really appreciate being invited.

Jordan Buckner: I know you absolutely love design and packaging. I would [00:01:00] love for you to share, like, what's been your experience with packaging design and why have you been viewing it from a lens of conversion driven packaging? 

Sanders: Yeah, so it's a great question. So I worked for a marketing agency for many years and also been working a lot of freelance and then also obviously in design and I kind of saw that there was a big gap between marketing and design.

Marketing agencies really understand marketing and tactics. They don't understand brand and design very well. And branding and design agencies often understand the design importance, but not necessarily the marketing language. So we really look at packaging itself as basically a way to promote and tell your story and sell the product itself through the packaging itself utilizing marketing language and educating the customer.

Because When a customer is looking at on the shelf they're not able to get a demo of the product all the time. So you have to inform them of what information sets you apart from the competition, what your differentiators are, what your brand story is. [00:02:00] And ultimately, we try to look at that canvas, as well as the entire client experience, to help increase those sales conversions.

Jordan Buckner: No, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And I think. Everyone's job is more complicated now when you have both digital sales and retail sales for products. Because if you're in the grocery store, if literally 20, 000 products on the shelf and your packaging and your product needs to stand out from 6 feet away from 10 feet away, if customers who have no idea what you are, how do you stop them to grab their attention?

And those who have Are fans of your product? How do you make it easy for them to find so they don't miss your product that's on the shelf? And at the same time, most packaging, if they're sold online, you're looking at it from like 6 inches away and quickly because people are scrolling through their phones.

And so it's a much different experience of managing those two. I'm kind of curious if you had to deal with that of looking at The difference between like retail packaging and digital packaging and how you make decisions based on the elements to [00:03:00] include. 

Sanders: Yeah, we actually have to basically consider both most of the time, unfortunately, which I guess that's actually a positive, right?

Because it's good to sell online as well as in stores, but we do usually ask our clients where they're predominantly going to be selling, but I love this question because we actually utilize something that I call peripheral selling, right? So when you're walking through an aisle or a shelf peripheral selling is what kind of grabs your attention on your peripherals, right?

That you, and you can do that from color blocking. , you can do it from contrasting colors and there's different design tactics to dualize. But with all of our clients, we try to say, look at the entire client experience. So even though our job is to come in and help with the design. We like to be a hands on as early as possible from the naming conception of the brand, or if it's rebranding, obviously looking at the design, but we want to look at the customer experience, whether they're walking into a store, like what marketing material can you put outside of the store?

What market material can you put in the store as store shelf displays, or when they walk up to the shelf. Like what type of [00:04:00] tactics are we using for peripheral selling to grab their attention? And cause you want to immediately grab their attention off the shelves and have them look at your product.

And then when they look at the product, you have to close the deal. That's where marketing language and. Having a clear value offer on the packaging is going to make or break whether they purchase your product or someone else's. And then when you're looking online, it's even harder because you have to use the peripheral selling, but it's sometimes smaller.

There's not really the shelf like they're connected. A lot of times they're spaced apart but we take in all of those tactics , for both mediums. 

Jordan Buckner: Oh, my goodness. So much to dive into here. So I want to maybe start with the strategic thinking behind what to put on your packaging first.

And then let's go into some of the tactics in terms of the actual elements and hierarchy on the physical design. So strategically, if you're selling a product, A lot of times like founders will have an idea of what their value proposition is, at least from their perspective, but also feel like there's a disconnect between what the [00:05:00] founder wants to sell and what the customer necessarily is buying as an example with my brand.

And I ran TeaSquares. We create essentially a bite sized energy bar that was made with tea for a natural caffeine boost, right? We decided at the beginning, because we didn't know anything, to call our product a tea infused energy snack, because we thought that was descriptive of what it was. The problem is that zero people have ever gone into a store looking for a tea infused energy snack, not even myself.

And so what? We found was that people would say, huh, interesting, and keep walking by it without buying a product. 

Sanders: Yeah, that's a great question. And you actually kind of answered it already a little bit is with everything that you do in business, whether it's business development or even individual design projects.

The first thing to always look at is the target audience. And then the market I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that most brands make is they either have a really great idea or they try to over solution too [00:06:00] quickly and most companies in general always start backwards. They have a product or the solution and they start designing there, but always start with target audience where they congregate problem solution, then create the product.

And then I like to add an additional step for loyalty. How do you create like loyal customers? 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah. So, and I mean, strategically, like, what's that process of really understanding the messaging from a customers and consumer, like an audience standpoint, right? like, in my case, like, I realized there was a disconnect, but it wasn't necessarily sure how to go about.

Messaging or changing that language to match what consumers were looking for. 

Sanders: Yeah, I mean you should definitely start with the target audience understand Who your customers are and what problems they have and try to create solutions around that The other thing is to look at the market and understand where you fit in or if there's a market gap and then you have to build kind of the language around there.

So there's a few things to consider, right? If you're creating a tipping point in products, it's a little bit easier because the customers are already used to those type of products and [00:07:00] you're just having a tipping point, a feature or ingredient or functionality or selling point that makes it a little bit better than the competition.

If you're introducing a novel product that doesn't exist yet. Then what you have is that you have an education barrier where you have to first educate before you can make that sale. And that makes it a little more difficult. Like for example, you have tea infused product, but people aren't familiar with that.

So that's where you have to look at the visual hierarchy of where it fits in the market. And I think that's a huge importance. Most clients. When it comes to information the two biggest mistakes I see is the either have too much information or not enough information, but you have to assess the visual hierarchy of that.

So, for example, if you have a lot of brand awareness, then you can actually have the visual hierarchy focus more on the brand and because people are going to be looking for the brand first and then your product. Second, if it's in the supplement market, for example, there are a lot of times looking for what the supplement is, the product type.

First, before the brand, you know, like we've all seen like the on brand and they have very small logo, but then the product self [00:08:00] is really large that people are looking for college and they're looking for creating whatever it is. And sometimes that's bigger in the visual hierarchy. In general, you really want to have a visual hierarchy and a directional line that focuses on 3 to 5 things.

3 in the front if is better and kind of balance that and then have the directional lines where. And you know exactly which is the first item they recognize what the second item is and what the third item is. And then if they're already looking at the product and you grab their attention, then you can add additional language on the back of the packaging or in a different area that maybe isn't grabbing the attention.

But you want to first focus on a few three key things to grab the attention first. If it's a new product, you're going to have to educate them on that. So , that's where it's definitely going to be a little more challenging and I would focus on the visual hierarchy first. 

Jordan Buckner: And I would even preface that to say it's not a little bit more challenging, it's a whole lot more challenging.

Because that's what we face with TeaSquares and like no one knew what Tea infused energy snack was. But when they taste it, they're like, Oh my gosh, this tastes amazing. And we tell them the benefits. They're like, Oh, I can like replace my [00:09:00] second cup of coffee a day. Like with this good gives me that little bit of.

Energy boost without the jitters of a crash, but the educational hurdle that we faced to get that product into people's mouths where it's actually like hindered by our packaging because they had no idea like what to really expect because they had never experienced that before. And if your product requires education, know that it's going to take money.

And usually that money sum I'll just conservatively say from my experience is like in the millions of dollars. 

Sanders: Educating customers on anything that's new is extremely expensive. I mean two of the most expensive things is brand awareness and education. If you look at Coca Cola, for example, they're the pinnacle like brand awareness because they're packaging is literally their logo.

There's no information. It just says Coca Cola on a can. Like that is the epitome of brand awareness, but they're spending billions of dollars a year. So that they can literally just put the logo and then sell you a product. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you know, and like the cheapest, you've got a very cheap product, then you have to overload almost on the information of selling points to compete and be [00:10:00] like, Hey, well, we have a better bang for your buck.

You have all this information for TeaSquares is a great example of. What might help with that is you know, calling it tea infused is already like an education barrier, but maybe starting with like energy bars or energy snacks and start with the common denominator, start with more of a tipping point, even if it is a novel product, because you start there.

You want to attract what people are already looking for and then you can educate secondly, right? So if you started with maybe a big call at that as an energy bar that could grab the attention and then they realize Oh, this isn't a normal energy bar This is a tea and infused energy bar and then you can actually go once you've grabbed their attention on that you can actually talk about the benefits on the packaging of Why tea infused is better than the alternative product and that would probably work tremendously 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, I mean , you're so right in that, like, I wish I did know that back then, because essentially, like, we needed to ground the customer in a current behavior instead of trying to change their behavior completely.

Right? And like, I think that's what we were doing with a Tea infused energy stack. They had [00:11:00] nothing to base it off of versus if we said, Hey, do you buy energy bars? Yes. We're an energy bar, but we have Tea because it helps you stay alert without the jitters were crashing. They're like, Oh, okay.

Like that makes sense. Cause they could ground it in something like I buy this and this is a slight tweak on it versus so many people are like, why would I buy this? When would I eat it? What would I, they weren't actually saying this. So like, what would I replace it with? Like, what am I, what's something I'm currently doing that I would replace it with?

And they had no basis for that, which was to our detriment. 

Sanders: Yeah, that's where the importance of visual hierarchy comes in because it's really challenging to identify, okay, what are the three top things that we want to focus on the visual hierarchy? And I always see this with businesses, there's a lot of people compete and they want to put too much information or they focus on the wrong object.

And you want to always go for the biggest common denominator that is going to attract people first. A great example of this is Olipop, right? Olipop came in and what they did is it was a probiotic soda. That's But what they did is like their , big visual hierarchy is when you look at the brand, you see [00:12:00] Olipop it's already designed kind of like a soda, but the big call is like, Hey, it has five grams of sugar.

And you're like, wait a minute. This is. Five grams of sugar in a soda with, you have Coca Cola it's doing, and I referenced them again, but they're doing like 45 grams of sugar or whatever it is crazy. But then once you grab the product and look at it, so that helps with peripheral selling. Then once you grab the product, you look at it, you realize then there's secondary information.

Okay. This is a prebiotic or a probiotic soda. It talks about the health benefits, but that, initial. You know, five grams is that common denominator that's going to really pull them because if they promoted real heavily, hey, this is a probiotic soda, it might not work. 

Jordan Buckner: I completely agree. So let's break down into maybe the hierarchy.

Like, what do you usually recommend or like the core elements that need to go on the front of the packaging? And then how do you determine the hierarchy? And like, what does hierarchy even mean? Like, is it just size, font, readability? So, I mean, let's start with like, what are those core elements you need to have on the front?

Sanders: Yeah, that's a great question. So, visual hierarchy is what grabs your attention when you're looking at a packaging. And it's the [00:13:00] directional line and the order of what you look at. So, you know, if we are focusing on three key areas in visual hierarchy, it's, you should be able to look at it and identify what is the first thing that my eye catches, what is the second thing, and what's the third thing, and you want to have that hopefully within an organized directional line.

We're always told that design is our art in general is subjective. And that's actually a lie that art brokers tell rich people so that they can sell bananas taped to a wall. Right. The reality is like design is a science and it's actually a repeatable science. Now it won't. Control or make a break at a like a giant level, but you're talking about micro influences, right?

 I always like to say that design controls your subconscious because your subconscious brain picks up everything. Now we are conscious. Brain is a little bit slower, but our subconscious brain picks up everything. It's almost photogenic, right? And so we want to turn that into a science So when going to the visual hierarchy, there's a few things you need to look at.

Again, always comes back to the target audience in the [00:14:00] market. You want to deep dive on what the target audience is, what they're looking for, what their problems are, and you want to speak to those problems. The other thing is you want to look at what the market is doing. Sometimes the market can actually have a lot of control over that.

So I'm gonna use an example, like the vitamin world. If you look at, airborne, Zychem, any of those, they always heavily promote vitamin C. Even though we know vitamin C actually has like almost nothing to do with your immune system. Problem is, is that the orange juice companies years ago started flooding marketing saying that vitamin C will boost your immune system and they promoted it.

And now, what happens is consumers have been so saturated with that false information. That when they look at products, they're only going to buy the products that also have that vitamin C. 

Jordan Buckner: And usually the most vitamin C, 

Sanders: the most vitamin C. Yeah. Like emergency is a great example of this. Everyone started buying emergency thinking it was really good for you because it's got a ton of vitamin C.

and what the reality is, is that by emergency notice on them and so much sugar in it that it basically cancels out anything that's [00:15:00] going to really help you actually recover to get better. and so that's an influence on that market, right? All of these like health products, you look at Zycam and all of them, it's really the zinc and magnesium that's really helping you recover, but they have to put in vitamin C because the rest of the market is, and they're not going to sell.

So you have to look at the market and say, okay, what are my competitors doing? What is working for them? And where are the gaps? So first assess, Like you have to have a full picture of what they are doing. if a really strong selling point is like a milligram account on something, or if it's like, let's say it's a chip company.

If you're looking at, Hey, like what are the calorie count or what is the amount of sugars and a soda, right? You have to look at what everyone is doing it from a standard perspective and say, okay, like. Identify what that top priority is. Then you need to identify what are the market gaps in the differentiators.

And then you have to look at that and basically prioritize what's going to be best for you. And it's going to be based, that information will be determined based on your target audience and what they're looking for. So for example, if you're [00:16:00] targeting, I guess, is a health fanatic. You know, self declared nutritionalist like myself to some extent, then you're gonna want to, you know, promote that maybe it has less calories.

Maybe it has less refined sugar. Maybe the ingredients are sourced from natural sources, right? Maybe it has a natural the caffeine from natural sources. But then if your target audiences say is an energy drink brand and your target audiences a sales team that just really wants to have a ton of energy.

And focus and they don't really care what's inside of it, then you need to promote that. And so the example there might be that it has more caffeine than the competition, but maybe it doesn't have, you know, all natural ingredients or if it's a chip company, maybe it's the most, the healthiest, right? So you have to take a combination of that and it's all about prioritization and then identifying what is going to increase your sales the most on the front.

And then you can have secondary information, you know, on the back. 

Jordan Buckner: One trap that I fell into, and I see a lot of brands fall into, is the cleverness trap. And I would even say, like, calling our product a tea infused energy snack was trying to be clever. Like, it was descriptive, [00:17:00] but it was trying to be clever.

Of like, something new, something different. And even I talk about this a lot, but we had like 4 main points of differentiation with our product. It was like bite size. It was in a multi server pouch. We use tea and we had flavors like citrus green tea matcha, right? Like so many things different. But I see a lot of the most successful products actually stay very close to simplicity in terms of like.

The macros in the product, protein, fat, sugar, and like talking about that content wise, and then like usually like leading with that type of information, like that's how a lot of consumers are making decisions or your vitamin C example, it's about the milligrams of vitamin C, it's about like where those are sourced from, but it's very simple ideas actually, and not trying to overcomplicate it in that messaging.

Sanders: Yeah, goes back to, you know, go to the highest common denominator and you want to get the widest audience. You know, a lot of times clients will kind of debate and go back and forth on selling points with me, and they want to have very, like, very niche selling points on the front. And I'm like, well, your product, are you trying to sell to people that are, you [00:18:00] know, vegan, gluten free, etc.

Well, that's a wider audience. Why don't we promote that heavier than like one tiny ingredient, like L theanine, which like maybe a small demographic actually understands. And so like an example of like you know, TeaSquares is I would focus the priority on more of the common selling points people use to like the energy bar some of the macros.

Some of that I would prioritize in like the primary selling point information. And then what I would do is the Tea infused, the health benefits and things that really differentiate you from the competition. Some of those could be maybe secondary information because once you have it up close, you can have that smaller type, smaller, subtle design elements.

You can have it at a back information. There's ways you can make it like subtle and secondary where they can clearly see it. When they look at the product, but maybe they might not see it from that peripheral selling because the peripheral selling is really going to be on average tipping point information and I mean tipping point in case people aren't familiar is tipping point products are products that are just slightly better than the competition, [00:19:00] but it's a common product that they're used to.

Because if you have a new product or a novel product, then that education barrier is really, really hard. And it's also a lot riskier, right? A great example, I think from novel products that are very extreme but does really well is Apple, right? When people come in and I always like to say that good brands solve problems that customers know they have, but great brands solve problems that the customers didn't know they have Apple does a really good job of that, where instead of making buttons simpler, they're like, let's just remove the buttons altogether, right?

That was a problem when people didn't realize like they've been half sometimes, right? But it's risky to create novel products because of that education barrier sometimes too. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, I think the core, I know in studying Steve Jobs, who I love, it wasn't that the customer didn't have the problem realm.

It's that they did, but probably didn't know how to describe it or didn't understand why. But once they tried it, it was so intuitive where they're like, Oh, I just get it. You know, even say like I remember my dad, brother, my daughter, like I, Android tablet, like [00:20:00] one of the cheap ones, and like, she's in it, like, and there's no idea, like, how do you, like, I didn't even know how to use it or set it up and like great software, but like, I could not just do it.

And versus he gets like an iPad and just like, like, navigates the whole thing easily. Right? And she's like 2 at the time. So I think like, it makes a huge difference in that. And I think with CPG products one of the core things I realized just in that conversion is like being able to answer a customer's questions so that they know your product, that you're answering all their buying decision questions up front, so then they can determine if it's for them or if it's not right.

Because like most products, like, People are not going to, I don't buy most products in the grocery store and not everyone's going to buy your product, but people should understand what your product is and the value, and then they can make the determination if it's for them or not. And I think that's the core area that a lot of products are missing.

Sanders: Absolutely. I mean, you have to have a clear product offer and you have to have a clear differentiation and you have to have a clear brand story and narrative. Yeah, 

Jordan Buckner: Silky any last things in terms of that you've seen as you're working with clients [00:21:00] on tips or tactics to help increase the conversion value of your packaging?

Sanders: I mean, the big thing is the prioritization of those visual hierarchies, understand, like, how you're different differentiation, but the other thing is, too, , is also about building you know, if you want to have loyal customers, it's about attention to the little details. And really creating a unique brand experience.

So sometimes it's not even about the differentiation It's about the experience, right? Really great example. That is, you know liquid death is really just a marketing company. It's not a water company. Let's be real. It's just the marketing company. It's water in a can, but they made it so that you have that experience where if you're a designated driver at a bar, you can drink liquid death and still look pretty bad ass.

But you want to create a really unique brand experience and that could be the marketing language that you have on the package. It could be the design of it, it could the extreme detail to functionality and, you know, like a lot of it's a new brand, but a lot of I think Rivian has a really loyal following with their customers is because they put extensive.

Research into the [00:22:00] little details of what customers want and functionality. And you can do the same thing, you know, with even the CPG products, it could be the messaging, it could be the experience a lot of packaging that we do, we actually do really cool hidden messages. So when people, when customers open boxes.

They actually have a message to them or like a unique pattern. So when, with our clients, we like to start from the entire client experience from before they make the purchase to after they make the purchase. But there's also that unboxing experience. What does it feel like when you unbox a package, when you open it up?

Steve Jobs was really one of the unique experience. And they build that packaging around the unboxing experience, because in that time, everyone was just basically plastic wrapping products. Right? But the unboxing is part of the experience. Using the product is part of the experience. Eating the product is part of the experience.

Pringles literally designed a chip that makes a crunch no matter where you bite the chip. That's actually, everyone thinks it's made because it stacks, but it's actually engineered. To make a loud crunching sounds impossible not to and that was really smart for [00:23:00] marketing, but it's also unique experience, right?

So you could build that experience from the product itself from the features for the packaging from the unboxing or even from the messaging where they don't expect it and they open a box and it has like a statement to you know, like snapple does the fun facts inside of the bottle cap.

You don't expect that, but then it kind of builds a little bit of that loyalty and a unique experience. 

Jordan Buckner: I love that. I love adding in a little bit of the unexpected and the way that maybe bring some surprise, delight, and joy to the experience of products and moving it beyond just like a commodity. And I think adding that personality plays a lot.

I think probably as you mentioned with those examples from Steve Jobs to Rivian to Priggles, right? Like a lot of that comes from The founding team and what they care about, I think, as well, and having that founder superpower personality really shine through into the product. And then people can start relating to that experience if that's something that they value as well. And so I think that's a really great thing. 

Sanders: Can I [00:24:00] add just one thing? Okay. So one of the tricks I think to creating that brand loyalty , is like to have fun. Right? Designing brands and packaging or building your product to life is really fun and follow the passion. If you're really passionate about it and you have fun doing it, then you'll naturally come up with really unique solutions to have an incredible brand experience that your customers are going to love and grow loyal to you.

Jordan Buckner: I think that's amazing. Sanders, tell me just a little bit about NUEX Creative and how you help brands. So people are listening to this and like, I need better packaging. I need to do a refresh. What is it exactly that you do? And then how can people reach out? 

Sanders: Yeah. So we design leading brands and conversion driven packaging design. So we help build lasting brands, launch successful products and grow loyal customers with consistent sales. We understand how hard it is to launch a new brand and it's time consuming and costly.

And so we use design strategies and a proven process to help increase those conversions for clients. 

Jordan Buckner: Awesome. I love that. And then how can people best get in touch with you? 

Sanders: You can find us on social [00:25:00] media or go to nuexcreative.com 

Jordan Buckner: awesome. And we'll clearly link to that in the show notes.

Sanders, thanks for being on today and love talking about packaging. It could have gone on for like hours. So I love this stuff too. And hopefully everyone who will listen has some new ideas, tips, and strategies that you can take away and use for your business. 

Sanders: Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.