When asked how they visually identify a brand, most people would say it’s with the logo. That’s perfectly normal – a logo is a name tag, it’s almost guaranteed to be different (though not necessarily better!) than your competition’s. That doesn’t mean that your branding starts and stops with your logo, though.
Mehmet Gözetlik has nicely illustrated that point with his series of deconstructed packaging designs. By stripping down all the graphics -leaving only the product’s name and the container itself – he concisely shows how there’s more to marketing your brand than slapping a logo on your product. Anyone can tell that the bottle in the photo is Tabasco sauce. You could even remove the name altogether, leaving only a blank bottle, and people would still recognize it. It isn’t generic and it doesn’t look like the competition’s product. It probably costs them a few cents more per unit to have that distinctive red-capped bottle, but it’s well worth it. No one mistakenly buys President’s Choice Tabas… er, hot sauce?.. if they wanted the name brand because it’s impossible to confuse the two.
That reasoning isn’t limited to packaging – it goes for website design and marketing in general. You need to have a distinctive voice, but most importantly you need to stick to it. Don’t change your bottle every year in the hopes that it will go “viral”, or because a new competitor has fresh packaging and you’re afraid people will buy that one just because it’s shiny and new. You don’t completely change your personality year over year, so why should your business? It has its own character, its own voice. Figure out what its voice is, and express it clearly. You can’t slap a great logo on a product that doesn’t have a clear focus and expect people to pick it out in a crowd. Don’t cheap out on the bottle.