It takes more than just a pretty package to sell a product. To differentiate themselves from the competition, companies must develop a complete brand that resonates with consumers.

It is no secret that packaging plays an important role in marketing a product or brand. “After all,” as Ted Mininni, president of brand design consultancy Design Force, Inc., tells Packaging Digest, “only packaging delivers products directly into the consumer’s hands.”

However, leveraging brands solely on packaging would be a mistake. Mininni cautions that signature colors will not suffice to differentiate products. “To really maximize the power of packaging, marketers and designers must go further than they’ve ever gone before. That means leveraging of the brand and its properties are merely a starting point.

“Understanding the consumer’s engagement with the brand and the product is the next, and most important, consideration,” Mininni concludes.

To differentiate products from the competition, there are several lessons designers can take away from iconic brands — those who have the whole marketing package, who are “[t]rue icons imprinted in our consciousness,” STEP Inside Design Magazine says. Product, design and communication must all fit together to support and further the brand’s perception.

According to Branding Strategy Insider, these are the key steps to building an iconic brand:

1. Create an identity myth — one that resonates and shows direction to the masses via brand stories and activities;
2. Involve multiple storytellers — disseminate information via the company, culture industries, intermediaries and customers; and
3. Weave powerful brand stories — these should connect with consumers’ lives.

Once the brand has been established, however, companies are faced with the challenge of staying desirable over time and continuing to evolve. To do this, STEP Inside Design Magazine says, established brands must figure out their iconic value — what they’re known for and what they represent — then work out how much can be changed, what must remain the same and what can be reinterpreted. Lastly, the brand must realize what it wants to be known for.

“In developing an icon, the key challenge is to understand what to preserve and treasure, what to reinvent and what scale of change is appropriate,” STEP Inside Design Magazine advises.

Take as an example Apple — “once pigeonholed as appealing only to artists and designers, now the consumers of iTunes, iPods and iBooks crisscross age, income and professional demographics,” Entrepreneur.com notes. Apple made over its brand by broadening its appeal and focusing on “ease of use,” Allan Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates and author of Brand Digital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World, tells Entrepreneur.com. “This ease of use is translated to the packaging (open the box, the iBook is ready to go), shopping experience (no competing brands to confuse the shopper in Apple stores) and customer service.”

Apple has succeeded in creating such a loyal following that its fans forgave it for its 2007 flub with untimely iPhone rebates, and it survived accusations of locking customers into expensive AT&T service contracts. In BrandChannel.com‘s 2008 brandjunkies survey, Apple rose to the top because “respondents were more than willing to forgive the brand for its indiscretions.”

Why? Because of a history of positive experiences with the brand and its reliability. According to BrandChannel.com’s survey results, people value three things: innovation, reliability and simplicity, and Apple encompassed all three.

But not all brands have been as lucky as Apple — even the iconic ones like Coca-Cola, which was voted the best global brand in Interbrand’s 2008 Best Global Brands ranking, and has been eight years running. However, it is not without its own branding blunders, as dealt with at some length in the 2005 Malcolm Gladwell book Blink. In 1985, The Coca-Cola Company decided to terminate its most popular soft drink and replace it with a formula it would market as “New Coke” to keep Pepsi from gaining more market share.

Although New Coke fared well in taste tests, consumers were so attached to the original that they boycotted the New Coke, expressing their disappointment rather loudly, thus forcing Coca-Cola to bring back its original brand two and a half months after New Coke was introduced.

Then there’s Crystal Pepsi — PepsiCo’s attempt in 1992 to differentiate from Coke — which only worked to confuse consumers. “The only problem was that a product with the word ‘Pepsi’ in its name was expected to taste like, well, Pepsi. But it didn’t,” writes Matt Haig in the book Brand Failures. “In fact, nobody seemed to know what it tasted of.” After two unsuccessful launches — Crystal Pepsi and then just Crystal — Pepsi admitted defeat and pulled the product in 1994.

Or how about Ben-Gay Aspirin? Ben-Gay is known for its analgesic cream that relieves arthritic pain, muscle aches and back pain by delivering a warming sensation to the affected area. The company decided to launch Ben-Gay Aspirin to take advantage of its existing distribution network and reputation for providing pain relief. “The only trouble was, Ben-Gay was so strongly associated with burning cream that it was unable to make the transition,” Haig writes in Brand Failures. “Nobody liked the idea of swallowing a Ben-Gay product.” Thus, Ben-Gay Aspirin failed.

So, what can we take away from these three blunders? 1) Do not underestimate the power of your brand and its significance. 2) If you’re going to expand your brand, ensure that the connections between products are logical. 3) Don’t assume market gaps need to be filled, i.e., just because clear cola didn’t exist, that doesn’t mean it needs to be invented.

Along with the lessons from others’ branding blunders, here are some last items from New Brand Experience to keep in mind when constructing and developing your brand:

• Even if you have the best product in the best package, it will not sell itself;
• Differentiate yourself beyond just look and feel and communicate that difference in all your messaging;
• Understand your customers;
• Poor branding may be more detrimental than no branding;
• Track a branding campaign’s effectiveness; and
• Don’t forget your existing clients when reaching out to new ones.

To have a successfully packaged brand, companies must consider more than just shelf-appeal. They must connect with the consumers through their product and the way that product is delivered.

Resources

Package Design Can Revitalize Product Performance
by Ted Mininni
Packaging Digest, Sept. 1, 2008

Who Wants to Be Iconic? Designing Futures for Iconic Brands
by Jonathan Ford
STEP Inside Design Magazine, May 2007

Building Iconic Brands
by Derrick Daye and Brad VanAuken
Branding Strategy Insider, Nov. 14, 2007

Brand Makeovers: 3 Lessons in Reinvention
by Emma Johnson
Entrepreneur.com, Nov. 24, 2008

A Concentrated Dose of the Brandjunkie Results
by Jim Thompson
BrandChannel.com, April 7, 2008

Brandjunkies on the Influence of Brands: The Brandjunkie Survey Results
by Jim Thompson
BrandChannel.com, March 31, 2008

Interbrand Announces the 2008 Best Global Brands
Interbrand, Sept. 18, 2008

Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown and Company, January 2005

Brand Failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time
by Matt Haig
Kogan Page, May 2003

The Biggest Branding Mistakes
New Brand Experience

12 Effective Strategies Apple Uses to Create Loyal Customers
Inside CRM, May 15, 2008