MYP Design Branding, Packaging and Marketing Notes

A Brand Is a Promise People Recognise Before They Read

1. A brand is what somebody expects from a product before they touch it, built from every advert, shop, logo and past purchase they have met.
2. Brand identity is the part the company controls on purpose: the name, the logo, the colours, the typeface, the tone of the writing and the shape of the products themselves.
3. Brand image is what customers actually believe, and it drifts away from what the company intended, which is why firms keep running surveys to find the gap.
4. Consistency is what makes any of it work, because a logo printed in six slightly different blues stops being a recognition shortcut and becomes visual noise.
5. A strong brand lets a firm charge more for the same job, since a 3 pound unbranded bottle and a 20 pound branded one can hold the same 500 ml of water.
6. This is the MYP key concept communication at work: the product is talking to the buyer before the buyer has even used it once.

A Logo Has to Work at 10 mm and at 10 Metres

1. A logo is the compressed version of the whole brand, and it has to stay readable as a 16 pixel browser tab icon and on the side of a lorry.
2. A wordmark sets the name in a distinctive typeface, like the Coca-Cola script that has been in use with only small changes since 1887.
3. A symbol drops the name completely, like the Nike swoosh, which only communicates because millions of people were taught it alongside the name first.
4. A combination mark puts a symbol next to the name, which is the sensible choice for any company nobody has heard of yet, including yours.
5. Test a logo by printing it 10 mm wide in black and white, because a mark that fills in or vanishes at that size will fail on a pen, a badge or an engraved plate.
6. Simple flat shapes survive every process, so a mark built from three solid shapes cuts cleanly in vinyl, stitches in embroidery, engraves on a laser cutter and still reads on screen.

Colour and Typeface Carry the Brand When the Logo Is Absent

1. Colour is the fastest signal a brand owns, because a shopper recognises a familiar colour block from across an aisle before any word is readable.
2. Brands pin their colours to exact codes, giving printers a Pantone number, screens a hex value and packaging a CMYK breakdown, so every batch from every supplier matches.
3. Colour carries learned meaning inside a market, so on UK food shelves green reads as natural or vegetarian, red and yellow read as fast and cheap, and black with gold reads as expensive.
4. Those meanings are cultural rather than universal, since white is worn at funerals in parts of East Asia and at weddings across much of Europe.
5. Typefaces carry tone: a geometric sans serif reads modern and technical, a serif reads established and traditional, a rounded sans reads friendly and aimed at younger users.
6. Use two typefaces at most and give each one a job, one for headings and one for body text, or the packaging starts to look like a school noticeboard.

Packaging Does Four Jobs, and They Argue With Each Other

1. Packaging has to protect, so a glass jar needs enough corrugated board and enough empty space around it to survive a drop test and the weight of a stacked pallet.
2. It has to inform, carrying contents, weight, instructions, warnings, a barcode and often a QR code to the full manual.
3. It has to sell, working as a small poster on a shelf where it gets roughly three seconds to be picked up rather than walked past.
4. It has to comply with the law of the country it is sold in, which fixes what must appear and sometimes how large it must be printed.
5. These four pull against each other, because a window that shows the product weakens the box, and a full ingredients panel takes the space the photograph wanted.
6. Packaging comes in levels: primary touches the product, like the crisp bag, secondary groups it, like the multipack box, and tertiary moves it, like the shrink wrapped pallet.

Labelling Is a Legal Requirement, Not a Layout Choice

1. Labelling rules exist so a buyer can compare two products honestly and avoid being harmed by one of them.
2. A UK food label must carry the product name, an ingredients list in descending order of weight, allergens emphasised within that list, the net quantity, a date mark and the business name and address.
3. Electrical goods need a UKCA or CE mark, which is the maker declaring the product meets the relevant safety rules, plus the crossed out wheelie bin symbol for separate collection.
4. Toys carry age marking, and the warning that a toy contains small parts unsuitable for children under three is a legal requirement rather than advice.
5. Recycling labels such as the resin identification codes 1 to 7 stamped in a triangle, and the UK On-Pack Recycling Label, tell the buyer what the local council will actually take.
6. Mock up a realistic label for your own product even though it will never be sold, because filling in those fields forces you to know your exact material, mass and user age.

The Marketing Mix: Four Decisions That Have to Agree

1. The marketing mix is four linked decisions, often called the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.
2. Product covers what it does, what it is made from and how it looks, which is the quarter of the mix a designer controls directly.
3. Price sets expectations before the box is opened, because 4 pounds makes a buyer expect thin moulded plastic while 40 pounds makes them expect metal and a guarantee.
4. Place is where it is sold, and a supermarket product needs a flat printable front and a hanging hole while an online only product needs to survive a courier and photograph well.
5. Promotion is how people hear about it, through adverts, social media, in store displays, sponsorship and plain word of mouth.
6. All four have to point the same direction, since a handmade recycled notebook priced at 18 pounds, sold in a pound shop and advertised with a cartoon, contradicts itself three times.

Packaging Is the Part That Becomes Waste First

1. Packaging is usually the first piece of a purchase to be binned, sometimes within a minute of the product reaching the kitchen table.
2. It fills a large share of household bins by volume, which is why councils collect it separately and why new rules aim at it directly.
3. Over packaging is the visible fault: a 20 gram electronic component inside a moulded plastic tray, inside a printed card box, inside a shrink wrap.
4. Mixed materials are the quieter fault, because a card sleeve laminated to a plastic film cannot be separated at a sorting plant and the whole pack is rejected.
5. The design fixes are single material packs, moulded pulp instead of expanded polystyrene, and printing straight onto the board instead of gluing on a paper label.
6. Extended producer responsibility charges the company for disposing of its own packaging, and the UK scheme sets higher fees for packs that are hard to recycle.
7. The lever you hold as a packaging designer is simply using less material and mixing fewer of them.