Brandpackaging & fashion
Brandpackaging attempts to reconcile the gap between branding and packaging design.
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As everyone knows, packaging and branding are a couple meant to spend the rest of their lives together.
The packaging is the speaker, the brand icon, it reflects its status and personality.
“Providing it with a power worth pursuing, packaging has a communicational force much more stronger than an advertisement in those same avenues, or graphic images within the mass media, for the simple reason that packaging has direct contact with the people, in the street, in the corner, in a coffee shop or in a square. It becomes a product whose owner will not get rid of it when arriving at home. He/she will keep it to carry other goods for its functionality to transport them, moreover, it will have the dual function of marking its owner’s personality (in the case he/she wants to do it). That is to say, the firm will have the guarantee that apart from the first promotion of the brand once the customer has left the shop, it will go again to the streets, it will drive down the avenues, undergrounds, airplanes and all modes of transport.”
And it is here, in the world of luxury and fashion where custom boxes become, in many cases, real fetish.
In this way, a simple cardboard box with a simple printing competes in importance within the marketing plans with the most sophisticated television spot in prime time.
The symbolism which has been created around the coupling packaging and fashion is very rich; and in this way, it is used by designers, photographers, film-makers…
The shop windows also remind us of this over and over again, in fact in one hour “taking a stroll” around Pinterest we have found more examples than we had imagined to create a board “packaging and fashion”.
That is why, such a simple object, so humble at first, and as inanimate as a rigid box is, has all powers that can be attributed to any universal symbol:
Making us believe that who wears the symbol embodies it (if you walk down the street with a Tiffany’s bag, who cares what you carry in the bag? People who observe you will get an idea of you). It has the capacity to evoke images from other periods or different cultures (a round box will always evoke an old hatbox). It can influence our emotions, materialize ideas, feelings, believes or values. Finally, symbols have the power of helping to define what is and what is not (for this reason, there are brands which intentionally bring their packaging designs closer to popular brands, to take over the feelings that that case evokes: luxury, vanguard, quality…)
Despite the fact that official studies of packaging have not evolved much, there are disciplines which try to specify and create tools to work with coherence and get the most out of the box to exploit its communicative potential.
This gave rise to brandpackaging, which attempts to reconcile the gap between branding and packaging design.
According to this philosophy, not all the marketing is only theory and not all the design is only practice. Marketing professionals have to experiment with the possibilities of packaging, shapes, textures, techniques, materials…and design professionals have to experience each brand for which they work for, they have to know what each product is facing in the point of sale and how long the life-cycle of the packaging being created is.
Cartonajes Salinas has been working from this perspective for many years, building synergies with the marketing departments looking for the “perfect symbol” for every occasion.