Product Labelling – It ‘Aint What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It

Talk to any sales, marketing or advertising professional and they’ll all tell you the same thing about persuading customers to look at your product; it’s not what’s in the box (or jar or tin or whatever) that the prospective buyer wants, it’s what the commodity will do for them.

Just occasionally, manufacturers and retailers forget this golden rule. Hi-Fi marketing, for example, went through a particularly dodgy phase in the 1970s and ‘80s when manufacturers tried to sell customers lists of impressive sounding but, ultimately, fairly meaningless features instead of high fidelity musical reproduction. Some manufacturers went so far as to emblazon the amplifier or cassette deck casing with stuff like “amorphous head” or “quartz DD natural sound”. All nonsense, of course, and caused its perpetrators to suffer significant falls in sales when more sensible marketing techniques – like stressing how good the kit actually sounded and suggesting that punters should try listening rather than obsessing about lists of features – had the majority of serious buyers voting with their feet.

Labels sell products

These basic rules of sales and marketing apply just as much to your products’ labels as to any high profile sales and marketing campaign. Because, at the point of sale, labels are one of the most effective, and probably most underrated, means of connecting with your customers. Take food retail, for instance. You’re not just selling a list of ingredients and calories. You’re not even necessarily just selling the means of producing a nutritious and tasty meal, although that’s obviously part of it. You’re selling a means of impressing the customers’ dinner party guests, or getting the customer to buy into a more sophisticated culinary experience, or saving them time and effort by taking the drudgery out of all that tedious preparation.

The use of colour images in producing attractive label design is an art in itself. This excellent little article, published recently in the Guardian newspaper – ‘How to Improve Your Food Photography’ - gives a really good insight into how to produce images which can transform labelling design to give your product a winning edge, saying much more about what the contents of the packaging can do for the customer than any amount of descriptive prose.

The use of full colour label printing and carefully thought out and attractive labelling design is an important part of getting the message across. It’s not just larger manufacturers who can take control of the label as a marketing tool in this way. Many smaller manufacturers and retailers have begun to turn to in-house label printing using machines from specialist equipment providers like www.quicklabel.co.uk to ensure that their product labels show customers what comes out of the product rather than just what goes into it.

Turning descriptive product labelling into something which engages customers with the product – and therefore acts as a powerful sales tool - isn’t practically or technically difficult. The necessary digital or inkjet label printing equipment is readily available, affordable and simple to use, with dedicated, user-friendly interface software. Ultimately, though, the most important element is to remember that the customer isn’t just buying your product. It’s more complicated and less tangible than that. They’re buying what your product can do for them.

About the author:

Phil Sharpe is a freelance photographer and designer. He has been involved in in-house label design since 1996 for a number of clients and has produced the images which feature on a number of well-known brand labels. A native of South Shields, he now lives and works in Brixton where he is involved in local adult education initiatives teaching digital photography techniques.