One of the earliest mediums of mass communication was the stele of ancient Egypt. Made of basalt, these tablets were about five-feet long, two and a half-feet wide and eleven-inches thick. Displayed prominently in high traffic areas, these stelais were the earliest form of mass advertising known to man. Fast forward several thousand years, and we’re kind of doing the same thing. Between the two, we’ve had numerous developments and breakthroughs in technology. We went from papyrus to paper. We built the printing press, the Internet, Facebook. So what changed or… what didn’t?

Once upon a time, outdoor advertising came in a variety of sizes. Okay, it still does. What’s different is that it can be posted basically anywhere. Aside from posters and bulletins, you’ll see advertising on newsstands, bus benches, on buses themselves, blimps, on gas pumps at gas stations, everywhere. The different shapes and sizes facilitate reaching consumers seamlessly, several times a day, from when they commute to work to when they pop out for lunch or coffee to when they leave to go home. Doing so presents both challenges and opportunities to those searching for the perfect marketing mix. As a word of caution, the more you segment and target, the more complicated your advertising campaign will inevitably become. Though, complicated does not necessarily equate to bad. For me, the objective is to reach the right people at the right times, which is convenient because outdoor advertising thrives on simplicity.

To be forthright, writing this entry has been really hard. Mainly, because you won’t find actionable metrics you can leverage like you will from the different analytics services you currently use. It’s difficult to link a piece of signage and the completion of a call-to-action. And when I say difficult, I mean it more closely represents shooting in the dark. That’s why marketers will typically prefer to buy placement in newspaper and magazines and continue to allocate their marketing dollars to online ad spend despite the fact that click-through-rates (CTR) are abysmal. Despite this, billboards are everywhere, and companies still pay to erect messaging on them. Why? Because you don’t have to try and convert the non-believers with truncated messaging in the smallest of windows only for them to maybe navigate to your website and then drop off. Billboards aren’t supposed to persuade. It’s a place where you can establish your business’s name and strengthen its image.

In a given year, there are about 250 business days after you subtract weekends and bank holidays. My commute to and from work takes roughly an hour combined each day, so we can safely say I commute around 250 hours in a year. That’s approximately 10.5 days sitting in my car just driving to and from the office. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on average, Americans spend more than 100 hours per year commuting. I don’t think that’s a very a good estimate, but you get the picture. Multiply this by the thousands of commuters driving down the highway, walking down the street or whatever you may have, and you have a monstrous reach that has mass target potential. You’re no longer honing in on just your target demographic but everyone past that. Frequency builds awareness. Awareness builds familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. Because in the end, unaided brand recall can be seen as the pinnacle of any advertising campaign. It indicates superiority relative to all of its competitors, and sometimes it becomes so dominant that consumers are only able to recall that one brand. History is full of such examples. Coca Cola was once so popular that people referred to all soda as “Coke.” “Fridge” is actually short for Frigidaire, not refrigerator. Photocopiers are often referred to as the “Xerox,” tissues as “Kleenex,” bandages as “Band-Aids” and petroleum jelly as “Vaseline.”

That’s not to say that the correlation is if you use outdoor advertising, your brand will become a household name around America. The takeaway is that these brands achieved widespread success by promoting recall instead of focusing on persuasion. If you’re already using cost per mille (CPM) advertising, you might want to start shopping around for outdoor ad buys.

You’re at the grocery store looking for laundry detergent, and your go to brand is sold out. There are two comparable substitutes sitting side-by-side on a shelf, but you’re not familiar with either. Which one do you buy? More likely than not, the one that does the best job conveying both quality and value. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking that you’re going to be stuck with whichever one you decide to buy for the next couple of months, so you might end up focusing more on mitigating your opportunity cost than finding something you love.

Whether you realize it or not, packaging gives form. And like any other marketing medium, its function is to help move consumers further along in the buying cycle by shaping perception, working as a tool for differentiation and, in the end, reassuring buyers that their purchase decision is the right one at both the point of sale and every time the product is used afterwards. Though prospective buyers might not know it, they want to be motivated because most, if not all, of their buying decisions are based on information sought out actively and passively.

The process begins with our perception of external stimuli. Marketers and retailers understand that perception can influence our behavior without our conscious knowledge, so they create products and stores, specifically, to maximize consumer spending. To learn more about this aspect of retail, check out our entry on “The Psychology of Advertising” here.

In order for us to efficiently function in this crowded environment, we choose to perceive certain stimuli while ignoring others. This is called “selectivity.” Selectivity lets us focus our attention on cues that provide meaning, while filtering out noise, so as not to waste our finite resources processing irrelevant information. “Thin slicing” is a term psychologists use to describe our capacity to make decisions quickly with minimal information. By and large, thinking is unanimously described as a conscious effort. Thin slicing more closely represents an instinctive behavior.

When faced with a new buying situation, a consumer will typically form a decision for choosing a product based on the information on or around the product, as well as the packaging itself, somewhere in the ballpark of two to four seconds. Generally speaking, shopping is a low-involvement, low-priority event that requires little or no mental or emotional investment, so packaging design should serve to connect the dots between a problem, or want, and a solution.

So what should you do to make your abbreviated sales pitch more memorable?

Consider how you might highlight your product’s image. What qualities set it apart from its competitors? What qualities make it better than any of its countless substitutes? Additional considerations should include your consumer’s involvement level, any possible time constraints and/or characteristics that spread across the aggregate.

Your packaging isn’t any different than a full-page advertisement for your company, more so for that particular product. It’s the vehicle that converts your brand’s identity, its positioning and your company’s culture into something tangible. So yes, it should be taken pretty seriously because a high-quality product coupled with high-quality packaging design conveys excellence, which translates into value in your buyer’s mind.

If you don’t know where to start, consider contacting a professional. As it happens, Bravo Design, Inc. does custom packaging design and has a proven track record doing so for entertainment and consumer packaged goods. Packaging is your first interaction with a customer. We recommend you put your best foot forward.

Photo credit: Kitsune Noir, Jesse Kirsch