Is this the most underestimated brand building channel?

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In the rush to chase digital performance, many brands forget a simple truth. Packaging is the one brand touchpoint you can be almost certain every paying customer will see, touch, and live with. Not for three seconds. For days. Sometimes weeks.

That’s why packaging is beyond design. It’s about marketing. Quietly, repeatedly, and in the moments where decisions are made and re-made.

For FMCG, food, personal care, and D2C, the pack does several jobs at once. It reassures first-time buyers, signals value, creates memory cues, and sets expectations for the experience inside. When it’s done well, it reduces cost of performance marketing because building trust becomes easier. Here are 8 reasons that make packaging one of the strongest brand-building channel.

1) Packaging reduces perceived risk

Most categories sell parity at the functional level. A shampoo promises softness. A biscuit promises taste. A protein bar promises nutrition. The shopper still has to choose with limited attention and limited proof.

This is where packaging becomes a trust shortcut. Hygiene cues, clarity of information, ingredient disclosures, and visual discipline all help a buyer feel safer about trying a brand once. Research consistently links pack design quality and hierarchy to how shoppers process brands and recall them later.

• Parle-G’s baby girl packaging has built decades of recall, you can spot it from across the aisle.
• Maggi’s yellow-red system works like a category lighthouse, you know it’s Maggi when you see it.

These designs are famous because they made choosing easier.

2) It’s the only media customers keep

Unlike paid media, packaging doesn’t disappear after a campaign ends. Once the unit is manufactured, it delivers impressions without another rupee spent on reach. Not free in absolute cost – printing costs money – but free in incremental media buying.

A jar that sits on a kitchen counter, a pouch in a tiffin bag, a box in an office drawer. These are repeated brand exposures that performance platforms cannot replicate at the same cost per view.

3) Packaging creates pricing power (or destroys it)

Pricing is rarely decided by logic alone. People infer value through cues such as materials, closure quality, label craft, typography discipline, and whether the pack looks planned or patched.

In India, where discounting can become the default lever, packaging often functions as the fastest path to premiumization without changing the core product immediately.

Compare how premium Ayurveda or beauty brands present themselves (texture, color restraint, structured labeling) versus mass brands that rely on loudness. One invites higher willingness to pay; the other invites bargaining.

Also, evidence from Indian consumer research shows packaging influences purchase decisions and even willingness to pay a premium in packaged foods among young consumers.

4) Packaging builds memory through distinctive cues

Brand memory is not built only through campaigns. It’s built through repeated encounters with the same recognizable cues.

Color systems. Iconography. A consistent hierarchy. A mascot or illustration style. Even the shape of a pack. When these codes repeat across a portfolio, your brand stops being a product and starts becoming a category default.

This is why the biggest FMCG players treat packaging as a brand asset, not a project.

Consider Paper Boat. The brand is selling nostalgia through illustration language and storytelling. The pack carries the emotion even before the first sip.

5) Retail and marketplaces reward clarity

Retailers want rotation and fewer queries. Marketplaces want thumbnails that convert. Customers want reassurance without work.

Great packaging checks all these boxes. It makes the selling ecosystem smoother through better shelf readability, fewer misunderstandings and clearer product understanding. That can improve retailer confidence and reduce friction at the counter.

6) It fuels word-of-mouth

For D2C brands, packaging often becomes the first physical moment of truth. A product can be excellent; the unboxing experience can still make it appear cheaper. These experiences often fuel word-of-mouth through social channels.

Unboxing content is not guaranteed, but good packaging increases the probability of share-worthy moments, because people like sharing things that make them look smart, tasteful, or ‘in on something.’ Branding experts are of opinion that such D2C experience frames packaging as a core trust-building touchpoint.

7) Packaging is your physical UX

When packs communicate poorly, it leads to claims, complaints and unwanted feedback.

Clear usage instructions, clean hierarchy, legible ingredient panels, storage guidance, and honest claims reduce avoidable complaints and returns.

In India, this matters more because usage contexts like climate, storage conditions, language comfort, and household decision-making vary widely.

8) It’s one of the quickest differentiation levers

Product parity is real in consumer packaged goods. Changing formulation takes time. Changing supply chain takes longer. Packaging sits in a sweet spot. It can transform perception faster than most other levers, but only if it is driven by strategy. .

 

Is your packaging building the brand?

Ask these questions:

• Can someone recognize your brand from color and shape alone?
• Do the front and back tell the same truth without making it complex?
• Does the pack look like it belongs on the shelf you want to win?
• Does it feel coherent across variants, sizes, and channels?

If most answers are negative, then your packaging is costing you twice. Once in printing, and again in media spend to compensate.

 

If you are building a new product, planning a redesign, or struggling with premium perception and conversion, packaging is one of the highest-leverage places to intervene.

At Purple Phase, we approach packaging as way do drive brand strategy, design, compliance, and buying behavior. So the pack sells even when your ads are not running.

If you want a packaging partner that thinks beyond ‘make it look premium’, write to us at info.purplephase@gmail.com