Visual recognition wrapped: Student explorations of product packages as brand messengers

Paper in proceeding, 2010

Design for visual brand recognition is of increasing strategic importance for companies. Specific focus is often on product packages that have strong communicative power. The package is used to inform about the product it covers or supports, to point out specific product qualities and, in specific, to create unique brand experience. In design education, new practical approaches are needed to engage students in exploring the possibilities of visual brand building and creating communicative and distinctive package solutions. In this paper, a student project is described and discussed to illustrate how package design can be approached from a brand communication perspective in the educational context. In addition to the overall description of the project and its phases, we briefly discuss one of the cases more in detail. In this case, a student group analyzed premium chocolate brands and developed a new fictive brand in this category by paying specific attention to the communicative qualities of the product package. We found that such a practical approach towards brands and their diverse aesthetic and symbolic qualities can provide a fruitful learning experience for design students.