With the current pandemic, all industries are facing significant changes, including the product packaging industry. No matter the type of product you sell, you will want to make some minor changes to your packaging to ensure it fits the changing demands of consumers. Keep the following tips in mind to help your product packaging and itself weather the pandemic.
Be Careful With the Tone
As you examine your product packaging, make sure that it does not seem as if you are trying to profit from the pandemic. This will set your brand in a bad light and hurt your overall branding and messaging.
Instead, focus on highlighting your brand’s values. These values should have already been there, but they may not have been as obvious before. You can then incorporate those values into the current situations, but be careful to strike a balance and not seem as if you want to profit from the situation. You will need to walk a fine line to avoid this but still show via packaging that your products can provide certainty and stability, or are useful, in this uncertain time.
Make Necessary Changes for Health and Safety
It should be unsurprising that some companies will have to make minor to major adjustments to their packaging to maximize health and safety. Take a look at your product packaging and see whether it poses a major threat in terms of potentially spreading coronavirus.
Hygienic Packaging
Coronavirus has highlighted the importance of hygienic product packaging, so make necessary changes in this respect. Also, be sure that your customers know that your packaging is hygienic via labeling or an announcement.
Balancing Sustainability With Health and Safety
One of the biggest changes due to the coronavirus is the increase in demand for and use of plastic. Before the pandemic, the industry was shifting away from plastic because of the negative ecological consequences. However, plastic is now seen as one of the safest surfaces for packaging due to its ability to be easily disinfected, something harder to do with cardboard.
This means that you will need to evaluate your product packaging with an eye to balancing out sustainability and using plastic to reduce the spread of the virus. You can do this by using plastic in strategic areas of your packaging. Or, you can research other sustainable alternatives that are also easy to disinfect.
Make Packaging for E-commerce a Priority
Even once all the stay-at-home orders have passed, people will likely continue to order online more to minimize interactions with others and the potential spread of coronavirus. As you examine your packaging, keep this in mind and make sure that your packaging works well for online sales.
There are several aspects to this. Your packaging needs to be visually appealing or practical even when viewed as a thumbnail image. At the same time, the packaging needs to adequately protect your product when it is in transit as a single item in a box, or with other items in a box. If you traditionally sold your product only at physical stores, this may require some adjustments.
With the right precautions and adjustments, your packaging should be on its way to bringing your products through the coronavirus pandemic with minimal impact.
