Make Your Products Talk To Consumers When It Matter Most: On The Retail Shelf

Every person who walks into a store with a mindset and ability to purchase is a potential customer. To drive the potential customer to pick up your brand and make a purchase is where companies are competing and investing to influence the customer’s decision.

Let’s understand typical consumer behaviour at a micro level during a sale:-

Consumers come to the store for purchase with either a predefined brand of product or unaware of the brand and with an intention of trial. When a potential consumer is in-store, brands are limited in their ability to directly communicate with the customer and can only hope that they remember the 1-minute advertisement they saw prior. As per a study by Nielsen, only about 15% of consumers stay brand loyal and 85% of consumers would be willing to try a new product or service.

Now at the point of sale, if a consumer wants to research a product or brand, he or she will typically search on Google. It is at this point that the brand loses its ability to influence a consumer directly, and is now at the mercy of dozens of web links that talk about your brand.

In this scenario, it is imperative for you to take back control over the message and medium of communication to directly talk to your consumer. Till a year or so ago, the technology did not exist to talk to your consumer directly at the point of sale in a targeted manner. However, that has now changed with the evolution of ‘smart packaging’.

How Smart Packaging or Intelligent Packaging Can Help

Smart or Intelligent packaging is the wave of innovation, which allows brands to use their packaging as a medium to overcome the challenges of brand engagement, brand protection, anti counterfeit solution, product information as well as track and trace while giving companies real-time and critical data about their consumers and the market.

Smart or intelligent packaging uses ‘smart’ digital identities in the form of QR codes, alphanumeric codes, or dot codes that are printed on each product. The QR code is the ideal printed ID since it can be scanned by any consumer with any smartphone without an application. Upon scanning, a brand is then able to communicate with the consumer and share the information it chooses. This simply means that smart packaging would allow brands to communicate with the consumer at the point of sale to convey information, provide offers, act as anti-counterfeit packaging and allow track and trace of every product in the supply chain till the point of sale.

See Also: How Supply Chain Digitization Can Boost Customer & Brand Engagement?

How Can Smart Packaging Help You to Increase Sales?

Marketing executives around the world have perfected marketing and sales strategies to convince people to buy their products. Internet of things (IoT) solutions now make every packaging into a connected package and act as your sales representative.

a. Introduction of Brand Awareness –

The first time a customer comes across a new product, instead of making the purchase, they would Google to see similar products and options across brands. At this point, the company with the highest spend on digital marketing usually wins. Smart packaging can recognize if a first-time consumer is scanning the product, and then customize the information to display videos with redirecting links to YouTube advertisements, sales incentive or any customized message from the brand to the client in order to convince a first-time user to try the product or brand.

b. Customize Your Pitch as Per the Customer –

Every person has a specific requirement and a background towards the purchase they make. Smart packaging allows the brand to build consumer personas based on a consumer’s previous scans and purchase history. This not only gives the brand key data and information about the kind of consumers they cater too but also allows them to display targeted ads and run tailor-made campaigns after analysing what factors contribute to sales and will drive a consumer towards purchase. This also opens up the opportunity for brands to cross-sell or upsell as a part of customer engagement. Offers and promotional content can also be run via Smart QR codes.

c. Make a Personal Connect –

A personal connection is very important for customer engagement where they pay attention and understand the information a brand is trying to communicate. This could mean customized language based on geographical location, customized campaigns based on personal or public events and festivities, or keeping up with local trends. Smart packaging has the ability to do exactly that where each code can be customized for different campaigns based on geographical location. Campaigns can be designed based on time of day, day of the week, or date of the month with the same code changing its behaviour with every scan depending on the campaign. All the changes happen in real-time and can be easily controlled via a few clicks on the cloud.

d. Highlight Your Unique Selling Points-

Conveying the brand’s benefits and advantage over other brands is sometimes just the thing which would finalize a sale. This could mean displaying product benefits, testimonials, best case use, and directions to use for best results. Smart Packaging is an alternative to Google reviews where the brand has control over the content and can select different combinations of information to be displayed for creating the ideal brand image for consumers. This also allows the consumer to know exactly what they are going to buy and further acts as a benchmark to evaluate competitor products. This works better in the case of digital packaging due to written proof instead of a claim by a salesman often regarded as unreliable.

e. Keep the Conversation Alive –

In case a sale is made or not, it is important to etch the brand name in the subconscious memory of the target consumer. The traditional way of print and media advertisements have proven to be a costly affair without the intended results. However, targeted online marketing has shown much better results. As many companies have already invested heavily in online marketing which is based on search history re-targets potential consumers on social media. Smart packaging has opened up opportunities for offline to online retargeting, where any interaction between product and customer in the physical world allows brands to retarget a consumer in the digital or online world.

f. Making Sure of Original Sale –

Brands take a significant hit when the consumer after all the marketing and sales activities end up purchasing a counterfeit or faulty product. This is a major problem as it can hamper the goodwill of the brand and lead to permanent loss of a customer. To make sure this does not happen, anti-counterfeit packaging solutions are used where the code once scanned will show the scan history. These hidden dynamic codes are one-time kill codes that cannot be edited due to the level of encryption once scanned. Such anti-counterfeit solutions not only build trust in consumer minds but also give brands a real-time update on counterfeit products in the market and highlight hotspots in case the brand wants to take action.

g. Transparency –

Consumers today have become sophisticated with their product choices and want to know every detail about their product. This includes the product journey, raw materials or ingredients used, manufacturing location and quality standards, production date and time, company information, and any other detail they can get. This information is oftentimes difficult to assimilate and share easily with consumers due to the operational challenges and complex supply chains. Smart packaging solves this problem and allows supply chain traceability to track and trace each unit of product in the supply chain from its journey as raw material to the point of sale. It is developed to simplify supply chain management for companies. This data can now also be made available for the consumer when they scan the product at the point of sale leading to consumer delight and brand loyalty.

Every brand can now implement these and many such powerful IoT based solutions by simply connecting with Sepio Products Private Limited. Sepio offers an end to end solution including smart IDs, an ecosystem of partners to put the ID on the packaging and a robust cloud-based analytics engine for a quick and easy transition into the digital world of smart packaging. You can simply drop an e-mail at [email protected] to enter the new age of intelligent packaging.