• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, October 13, 2023

I spent part of this week in a branding and marketing seminar, where I heard an interesting quote. It came from Mary Czarnecki, a Yale- and Princeton-educated marketing leader and co-founder of MAC Marketing Partners. She said: “We rarely buy brands we don’t know, and we rarely think about brands we don’t buy.”

Her point was that for fast-moving consumer goods especially, it is important to put yourself in front of your (potential) consumers as often as possible. The name of the game is brand awareness to ensure you are there when the consumer is preparing to buy. This point is also extensively researched and proven by the Ehrenberg-Bass institute and work by Les Binet.

I believe it to be true as well for brands that have a much slower purchase cycle or those that are a service rather than a physical product.

It has always been hard for brands to get onto the (virtual) list a consumer would consider buying, or are part of their repertoire. Which is why it really matters to build your brand using all the tools you have available, ensuring your brand delivers peak performance at any time, whether it is on social media, in video, in store or in a virtual store environment seen on a small phone screen.

Today, most weekly purchase decisions are made on autopilot. Consumers are working from a shopping list, possibly a pre-populated (soon AI-driven) list, and then simply click “order” or “deliver. Perhaps consumers even have subscriptions for certain brands or products. These purchases have become “set it and forget it” buys.

The whole process takes very little thought, with no real consideration for a brand of pasta sauce, toilet paper or cheese slices. Consumers typically get what they got the last time and think about their choice only when they see the dreaded “out of stock” message, or when they need something they have not purchased before. In really rare occasions, they may have made a conscious decision to switch brands.

Where packaging in the olden days had to communicate to a shopper in a physical store, now it has to also entice the roughly 20% of shoppers who buy their groceries online, and will not see your physical package until it is in their home. Before that, they will have seen your brand only as a tiny tile on their phone or desktop. That places a whole new set of rules (and opportunities) for your packaging strategy.

As an example, we looked at the categories of fruit juices and OTC daily skincare products. And guess what, there was a “sea of sameness” when you look at products on that tiny shopping order screen.

Very few brands have mastered the art of standing out and communicating who they are when in the online shopping environment. And because packaging is your biggest owned media asset, go give it some love. Your market share depends on it!