It's Not Just a Bag

Anything that reminds people about your organization is a representative for your brand.

Hence we have logos - visual representations of the corporate identity of a brand. We have advertising campaigns, carefully planned to accurately convey a brand's identity and proposed value to consumers. We have colors, fonts, store designs, soundtracks, and even smells that are strategically chosen for what they say about their respective brands.

But other things speak for your brand as well:

          Your partners (I blogged about that last week).
          Your product packaging (I blogged about that two weeks ago).
          Your facilities (how tidy are they?).
          Your corporate vehicles (how often do you wash them?).

          Your shopping bags.

Shopping bags (and other distribution packaging) have great - and often underused - potential as branding tools. Well-designed and attractively-branded shopping bags provide two marketing tactics in one:

• First, they serve as free advertising - distributing your logo, willingly, through the hands of every customer.
• Second, they serve as social proof - every customer seen with your shopping bag indicates support of your brand to those around them. And as Robert Cialdini would tell us, observing the approval of others towards a brand gives permission to new potential customers to try the brand, too.

Bloomingdales does an outstanding job of using shopping bags as branded items. People notice the cute, clever "Little Brown Bags" with which Bloomingdales customers leave their stores. The more customers shop at Bloomingdales, the more those Little Brown Bags are seen by others, and the more other people see public approval of the Bloomingdales brand.

FedEx also uses their "shopping bags" (aka their boxes) well. Every time you receive a package via FedEx, you see the FedEx logo, and are given another example of a customer who used FedEx for their shipping needs.

Start-up companies can use branded shopping bags to great advantage as they work to build brand recognition. Each time a customer carries out a branded shopping bag, the organization receives another instance of free advertising in the community, and another testimony of a [presumably satisfied] customer.

And to be remarkable, shopping bags need not be simple plastic bags stamped with a logo (although they very well could be). Why not use your shopping bags as another opportunity to exhibit great design? Why stick with a one-color print on plastic? Why not make your shopping bags something that are fun and attractive to carry around? Something that reinforces your brand's personality?

So, how are your shopping bags representing you? Do they speak your name in a clever, fun, innovative, or attractive way? Or do they speak your name at all?

On Judging a Book by its Cover

We judge books by their covers.

The judgment isn't necessarily fair, and it isn't always accurate, but it is a judgment that we make anyway.

I have loved to read for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I loved going to the library - or, better yet, the book store - with my mother to find a new book to read. However, if a book were to have any chance of my picking it up and taking it home with me to read, the cover had to look appealing. In my mind, the contents of a novel had no chance of being interesting if its cover were bland and boring.

The only possibility for an insipidly-covered book to make it past my "cover test" was if the book already had a strong reputation, or came highly recommended by a friend or teacher. (This exception was quite fortunate; otherwise I might never have picked up some of my now-favorite classics, like the works of Dickens or Doyle or Dumas or Austen.)

As consumers, we make the same judgment. When we encounter a new, unheard-of brand, we take its packaging as an indicator of its quality. If the physical packaging or product design looks clunky, and we have no other information about the brand, we have little reason to trust the performance of the product or the credibility of the company. If the company's website looks like it hasn't been updated since 1995, it may cause us to wonder what else about the company falls below current standards. If the exterior of a local restaurant is dirty, with bars on the windows and a parking lot overgrown with weeds, we often decide to drive past and eat at a place we know and trust instead.

Of course, this packaging judgment can be overcome, if we find a source of trustworthy information to allay our misgivings. If we learn that a brand uses plain packaging simply to maintain low prices, or to help the environment, we might be persuaded to consider purchasing it. If a friend insists that the product she ordered from an online company is the best product she ever used, we might feel better about ordering something from their outdated-looking website. If a coworker raves about this hole-in-wall restaurant that he found, we might be willing to try it, no matter how fearsome the building appears.

But without that other source of information, consumers often have little to go by besides the packaging. If everything about the packaging indicates lack of quality, consumers have little motivation to try to discover the actual quality of the product's contents.

If you're an unknown brand that is trying to become known, pay attention to your packaging. In the absence of other information about your product, we will judge your product by its cover.