The Strategic Art of Packaging Spectacle

It's Wednesday afternoon and you are procrastinating the midday, midweek doom by doomscrolling across every app that exists on your phone: Instagram, Reddit, and your favourite e-commerce website. There is a sweet surrender in being a bottom-funnel person.

The discounts flash, and the UI of the app is designed to pull you into category pages you truly have no use for, but there is a certain fatigue that happens when you look at every product through 300 x 300 pixels. This is where, for most brands today trying to crack the shelf-to-doorstep lifestyle, the codes of standard packaging design have started to become ineffective.
 

The solution may just lie in a screenwriting technique by Blake Snyder called "The Pope in the Pool." The basic premise is that most exposition is boring, but most exposition is also necessary. Thus, the way to handle it is at the heart of your exposition: keep something so unexpected, surprising, and thought-provoking that by the time the audience recovers from it, the exposition is understood and over.

Your packaging needs to be the Pope in the Pool (read: shelves). Instead of subscribing to category codes, there needs to be an effort to break them. But keep one thing in mind: packaging is only as good as the foundation of the brand identity. The boring exposition of a boring film is beyond saving.
 

Understanding the Art of Creating a Spectacle

The first step is to ask why things are the way they are: why are boxes cubes, and why is water wet? Think about everything until it reaches a point of schematic saturation.

Creative agencies are still treating packaging design as a strange blend of trend-hopping and echo-chamber distortion. Ever wondered why, suddenly, all the competing products in a category start blurring into each other? A good example of this would be The Ordinary, which inspired a minimalist trend, and suddenly, a whole generation of cosmetics brands felt the same in one way or another.

This is the nature of the pool. Brands confident in their story can express themselves in the category clutter, while brands that skipped the foundational exercise of finding their own presence philosophy will sort of melt into the blue of the brands they "feel inspired by."

There is one more important dimension of the pool: the ever-changing, ever-shifting part. You know what I am talking about: novel, quick commerce. This pool becomes much more cluttered when every brand has to tell its story through thumbnails.

For us, this is the premise: a shared, convoluted pool in which we must stand out.
 

Thus, the first step in putting the Pope in the pool is creating a deep, intricate, foundational brand strategy that understands the premise of the category, the psyche of its audience, and the narrative over which it can have natural authority.

Now, this part is often skipped. Why indulge in the dark, mystic arts of intangible variables regarding what my brand stands for? Rather, slap on a cool design and jump into business. We get the temptation, especially for emerging brands: with eyes locked on metrics that make immediate sense, brand identity and packaging design strategy can feel like expensive procrastination.

We must always remember that packaging design is an expensive, long-term affair, both financially and emotionally. Your marketing strategy can pivot quarterly, your campaigns can change yearly, and your paid media spend strategy can change weekly. Packaging cannot. In fact, without the right foundation, packaging design may not even happen. A lot of brands get stuck in feedback purgatory with their creative agency.

The introspective dive is not one to fear, but one to embrace!
 

The Pope in the pool is not just about a spectacle; it is about an honest one. If a brand and product cannot find their own truth—their own presence philosophy—they can never truly be confident in their spectacle.

There are two steps that every brand must invest in:
1) Packaging Design Research: Let the audience be the starting point. Create a sample set of your audience that best represents the source of business you plan for the product. While quantitative research is good, it can sometimes become an incomprehensible data mess. For emerging brands, qualitative research can be much more intuitive and fruitful. Understand their lifestyle, their behavior, and their expectations from the category. If your brand is at a stage of refreshing its brand identity and packaging design, understand their current salience toward your brand and product. Measure the outcomes across functional, emotional, and haptic parameters.

2) Shelf Study: You need to understand category codes before you break them. That is not a simple exercise when, in a lot of categories, everyone is trying to break the code in their own way. Zoom all of that down to a Blinkit or Zepto screen, and the task can become tenfold harder for brands and their branding agencies. Structured research on the shelves we want to conquer becomes imperative so you know exactly how your brand and product will be perceived, as well as the essential hooks that will help the audience see you.
 

Once your strategic base is ready and you are armed with research findings, you can confidently start breaking category codes. Your presence philosophy now needs imagination and a creative push, without you ever having to worry about whether it is right for your brand.

When we push the boundaries, we go beyond fonts, colors, and placement; these are baselines. Your presence philosophy and research findings should now enable you to think about formats, packaging ecosystems, brand architecture, and new materials.

This is how we create a spectacle. This is how we create an interesting exposition.