By Caroline Hagen
Sports packaging design is a unique discipline, where logo and brand equity plays a huge role. But what else can you leverage to catch eyes and inspire purchase? Here at Reach, we believe the secret lies in making an emotional connection, and where appropriate, enabling better range navigation.
Get emotional
Why does it matter?
Most sports packaging relies on a large logo – after all badging is vitally important in sportswear. But when you have retail sales the world over in outlets where sales assistants are sparse, packaging sometimes needs more help than just a brand logo can provide. So what else can you do? Creating an emotional connection. Providing a trigger for an emotional reward consumers associate with their sport is very powerful.
Reach & Speedo – emotionally immersive sports packaging design
Our packaging for Speedo’s goggles does just that. It captures that moment when the swimmer sinks down into the water to begin their swim – they see the water clean and clear ahead of them as they push forward to begin their workout. By triggering this powerful emotional connection, Speedo gains a powerful edge over its key competitor Zoggs. Speedo case study.
Enable range navigation
Why does it matter?
Sports brands typically offer a choice of price points to persuade consumers to buy top of the range or at least mid range. In busy sports shops, self service is often the norm, so the packaging needs to do the upselling for the brand’s behalf. This can be done in two ways: by clearly pointing out the benefits of ‘good, better and best’ on the front of pack; or by using the packaging format or print finish to underpin and justify the price premium.
Reach & Speedo – enabling self service across 10 languages
In Speedo’s packaging design Reach used both. The basic ‘good’ range has just one feature on front of pack and the pack format is a simple box. By contrast for the ‘better’ range, we created a soft fit holding device for the Biofuse sub-brand and designed a sliding inner pack format in which the goggles are held in a presentation format to give them a sense of added value. Read the full Speedo case study.