The Value of Collaboration in the Packaging Industry

A well-packaged product can make all the difference to your customers.

Packaging provides the first impression of your brand. After all, it’s often the first thing a customer sees of your products, company name, or logo. As such, it’s essential that you make your packaging secure, informative, and eye-catching enough to stand out on the shelf.

At the core of this process is creativity. New techniques for packaging are being developed all the time, and these must be adapted to specific product challenges and supply chain bottlenecks. Companies that do this successfully will see their KPIs rise in the short-term and will have a strong foundation for brand building in the medium to long term.

This raises the question: How can brands create the best packaging possible? What methods should they employ to ensure a design that is cheap, effective, and loved by their customers?

For many, the answer lies in creative collaboration.

Essentially, this means that brands are turning to outsiders to assist in their packaging design and production. The idea is that collaborations spurn creativity, inject expertise, and offer a fresh perspective on packaging ideas. This is precisely why we are seeing explosive growth in the packaging design industry, from small-scale consultancies to enterprise-wide collaboration.

Looking to get started? This article will explain everything you need to know about creative collaboration in the packaging industry. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, you’ll grasp a good understanding of the types of collaborations, their benefits, and trends to look out for in the industry.

Types of collaboration

A simple definition of collaboration is when 2 or more parties work together to create something.

In the context of packaging design, this usually means collaboration between dedicated designers and product manufacturers or retailers. This section runs through the various approaches:

Outsourcing

A cost-effective and popular choice for product manufacturers is to outsource packaging design to a third party. For instance, the use of a design agency or freelancer.

The benefit of this approach is that it provides a quick external insight into your packaging processes. You can gain useful perspectives from experts in the industry for a relatively cheap price. And, if you aren’t happy with the direction they have taken, you could simply choose not to renew the outsourcing program. This represents a low-risk and low-commitment approach to collaboration.

Business partnerships

A step up from outsourcing is to engage in direct business partnerships.

This is where you seek to create an ongoing, serious relationship with your third-party package designers. Often, this is the natural progression of an outsourcing-style partnership. The difference here is the signing of a medium to long-term contract, and the willingness of that partner to use their own IP and proprietary tech to influence your designs.

Joint ventures

A joint venture is a business entity created by 2 or more parties.

Typically, those 2 parties will pool their resources to generate packaging designs, which can be freely shared and used by both. You might see this in sister companies or branches of a conglomerate, where the sharing of research ideas is desirable. Usually, the 2 parties will have a direct line of communication, like an office phone system, for effective cooperation and speedy outcomes.

The benefit of this approach is that the financial risk is spread across multiple companies. Your brand could invest less money into a joint venture than an in-house solution and still be rewarded with beautiful and functional packaging designs.

Customer collaboration

Some brands will choose to directly engage with their customers for assistance in developing product packaging.

One popular approach is to host a social media poll where your customers can vote for their favorite option. In fact, Twitter recommends using polls to “garner suggestions about packaging.” Regardless of your approach, interactions like these are a great way to get people talking about your business, whilst showing your customers that you appreciate their input.

Benefits of collaboration in the packaging industry

By now, you know how companies collaborate to create packaging designs, but you might still be hung up on the question of why they do this. This section covers the main advantages:

Achieve creative designs

The main benefit of collaboration is that it encourages creativity.

When you have a single team working on your product’s packaging, there is a tendency for the ideas to become stale, as it limits the diversity of opinions. Whereas collaborations force you to approach a project from a different perspective. You can invite debate on which areas of the design are strongest from a wider variety of sources. Then, you know which features to rework or to drop entirely from the design. This is an essential process when working on a customized packaging design.

Ideally, you want to have an external means of quality-checking, where experts (or your customers) are invited to give their own feedback. Many businesses choose to outsource this task to consultancy firms or specialist agencies. They will know which packaging designs to use for what kinds of products, from their experience of working with previous clients.

Maintaining these high-quality packaging standards could be the difference between a customer making a purchase decision or not.

Build brand credibility

Packaging represents a golden opportunity for you to showcase your brand’s image and story.

This is the chance for your customers to fall in love with your products at first sight, and to recognize it as a premium option amongst its rivals instantly.

The upside of building a solid brand is that it boosts public awareness and extends your audience. In fact, according to a 2021 study by Dotcom Distribution, an average of 32% of respondents said that branded or gift-like packaging got them more excited about receiving the product. Creating buzz and excitement through your packaging is a great way to encourage engagement with your brand.

If people have seen an aesthetic, informative, and entertaining packaging design, they are likely to think the same of your products themselves. That means higher rates of inbound customers and website visitors, which will surely boost sales and help to establish your market position.

Lower your costs

Not every company has the capacity to build an in-house packaging design & construction solution.

Fortunately, collaborative projects offer them the chance to achieve similar outcomes for less. The most obvious example is outsourcing – which offers a rapid solution to daily tasks like payroll, customer service, or creative design.

At the enterprise level, creative collaboration can also be used to cut operating costs. Joint ventures represent a means of spreading financial risk for similar outcomes, and business partnerships may be used for gathering specialist input.

No long-term commitment

Creative collaboration is an attractive option for businesses to trial as it does not require long-term commitment.

If you choose to go down the route of an in-house packaging solution, you would have to hire a team of specialist employees and build your own infrastructure. This process requires great time, effort, and capital compared to external solutions. For example, outsourcing custom packaging production to a specialist factory.

Key developments in the packaging industry

Collaborative efforts help you keep up to date with trends and key developments in the packaging industry. This ensures that you will deliver on the expectations of your customers and the wider public.

In the meantime, here are 3 of the top areas that packaging designers are focusing on in collaborative environments:

Sustainability

As the climate crisis worsens, questions of product sustainability and eco-friendliness will only grow louder. Of course, a product’s packaging is expected to be held to the same standards.

Historically, plastic use was widespread in product packaging design. These days, research by Mordor Intelligence suggests that companies are more inclined to use product packaging that is 100% biodegradable. The greenest companies would opt for using compostable materials like cellulose, or recyclable solutions such as corrugated-fiber boxes. From a business perspective, making the right calls on eco-friendly packaging can even help your profits.

Wherever possible, you should aim to reduce packaging waste. In fact, the same report found that Amazon is now cutting down the use of their own cardboard boxes where a product’s original box is already strong enough - a solution they call ‘Frustration-Free packaging’. Brands should embrace this trend by creating sturdy packaging that can stand up to rough weather conditions and bumpy handling in the transit process.

Smart packaging

Packaging represents a physical aspect of a company’s brand-building process.

It’s the first thing that retailers and shoppers see, so it’s important that the packaging is branded, informative, and relevant. Beyond that, your physical packaging should link to your company’s digital presence, such as your website or social media. Here, consumers can learn more about your products and your brand.

The easiest way to achieve this is with QR codes. Almost everyone has a smartphone that can read these and direct them to your website. Alternatively, you may opt for near-field communication (NFC) tech, which activates when a device is held close to the packaging.

Using packaging as a marketing tool

Product packaging can go one step further – and invite customers to engage with your product directly. For example, a prompt for them to enter a competition or giveaway.

In this case, a QR code would be printed on a product’s packaging, but on the inside rather than the outside. Then, the customer has to buy and unbox your product for their chance to enter your competition. In the future, that customer will notice your brand on the shelf and associate it with that experience.

Now all you need is a digital marketing campaign to amplify the competition’s reach and a customer service operation that can handle a high volume of entries (such as using a phone system with an auto attendant).

How to drive a culture of collaboration

Creative collaboration is only as effective as the teams that work on your projects.

If you want to get the most out of your creative teams, you should set clear responsibilities and targets for your team members. Then, if their packaging design hits the mark, they should be awarded an extra piece of commission or bonus for their work. This will incentivize them to maintain high-quality and creative developments.

They must also be trained appropriately on business workflows so that your team is connected and able to communicate easily. This means you should aim to create a holistic onboarding process and an inclusive workplace culture that invites regular feedback. To do this, you will need to focus on training your business’s HR team before scaling your other departments.

You may choose to use a UCaaS platform that centralizes communication into one app and one employee account. That will ensure cross-party communication is dispersed teams is not interrupted. To go one step further – the most effective teams will use data workflow orchestration to streamline collaborative processes, implement automation, and reduce time-consuming tasks.

Conclusion

To conclude, packaging your products is not as straightforward a task as you might initially presume. You must combine elements of functionality and information into a beautiful design that your customers will come to recognize and love.

To do this, you must be equipped to deal with the challenges of packaging production. Financing your packaging design is one task, but ensuring that it is creative and fine-tuned to the expectations of consumers is even harder. You can do this by reaching out to industry partners and fostering a culture of collaboration for creative topics.

Collaborations offer a great opportunity for businesses to gain specialist insight and deliver a solution for any specification, budget, or company. If you’re just getting started, you may want to opt for a simple outsourcing operation to test the waters before developing a serious partnership or joint venture.

Grace Lau - Director of Growth Content, Dialpad

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration with the help of Dialpad's virtual receptionist service. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Grace Lau also published articles for domains such as Causeartist and DivvyHQ. Here is her LinkedIn.