Family packing refers to products of the same brand having similar visual packaging, making it easier for consumers to recognize and assign features to each product based on previous brand experience. Packaging elements are carefully chosen to make products attractive to potential customers. Familiar packaging can steer customers towards a particular brand, conveying an impression of quality and affordability. It is a feature of all commercial products, but can backfire if a consumer has a bad experience with one product in the range.
Despite its name, family packing has nothing to do with people’s families. Instead, it means that products of the same brand have a similar type of visual packaging. This helps consumers recognize products on the shelf and also helps them quickly assign features to each product based on previous brand experience. Family packaging elements, such as color and pattern, are usually carefully chosen by packaging designers to make the products as attractive as possible to potential customers.
Grocery store customers, for example, may look at thousands of different products during a shopping trip. Many decisions are split into two parts, as people generally don’t have the time to inspect all the choices individually. A brand represents a promise of a particular quality or value to a customer, and if the customer recognizes a brand they like on the shelf, it is the product they can choose over other untried choices.
Potato chips, for example, come in many different brands. Some successful brands have opted for instantly recognizable familiar packaging, such as in tall tubes. A customer who has tried one of the variants of this product and approved it, can easily see on the supermarket shelf where the other variants of that brand are located. He or she may choose a related product over other potato chip brands because the association with the first potato chip experience was pleasant and suited her or her purposes.
Brands that contain different products also tend to use familiar packaging. For example, a particular type of face cream may not share any practical characteristics with a nail polish remover, but the supermarket shopper will still associate previous face cream experiences with the potential usefulness of the remover. Advertisements can also add to the perception of a brand, and if face cream is expensively marketed, nail polish can also be viewed by the customer as a quality and luxury product.
Conversely, familiar packaging that gives the impression that products are good value for money can also steer customers in their direction when opting for cheaper products. Colours, patterns and materials are important in conveying an impression of the relative quality and affordability of a set of products. While it may vary by country and even by brand, ordinary family packaging in a cheap material such as thin plastic can tell the customer that the product range is cheap. Colors like deep purple, embossed boxes or heavy glass containers, on the other hand, can indicate quality and luxury.
In addition to food products, household packaging is a feature of all commercial products, large or small. A particular brand of construction equipment, for example, may all have the same paint jobs and decorative features as each other, so the customer can use previous experience to judge the quality of individual machines. A company with a good reputation and good products can benefit from familiar packaging, but it can sometimes backfire when a consumer has a bad experience with one brand’s product, even though the other products in the range are of better quality, as the customer may not buy them accordingly.
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