Wednesday, June 25, 2008

How to package solution for each market?

Packaging is very important aspect of any Solution or Product. Packaging makes product look better. But often we think if Packaging is so important then we should always make it perfect? and it is worth to invest more amount of money on packaging? Here the question comes How to package Solution or Product for each market?

When ever you are packaging your solution you should always look for the market environment. This is the most important step for packaging your product and to understand how we can manage our cost for Packaging.
In other words if you know what is people's mentality in the market or their spending style you can package your solution in a different way as effective as it can be.

Take example of Sauce bottle. for packaging of a Sauce we require a bottle and a bottle nob. Here how we can manage our money in packaging this. Lets say when we sell Sauce bottle to a customer we can find out what is his usage. Say he is purchasing bottle for Hotel than we can say Threading on bottle and its nob is not required. Threading does not take much of glass or plastic but what ever we can save we should do it. But in all conditions it is not useful. For this we should check what are the Market conditions. What is people's mentality on spending.

If you take US as a market, people mentality here is that they usually don't care for packaging. They usually check the Solution or a Product they are buying is solving their purpose or not. And in US people usually purchase with plastic money so they don't care much about the pricing, and its external packaging. But at the same moment you take whole Europe as a Market you see a complete opposite mentality on spending their money. Here people always look for value. Value is not the price but its use, appearance are worth for its price or not. and here packaging of a solution is always important in it value. So here Packaging is very important.
Now if you take India as a market you will find condition here is completely different than US and Europe. In India people usually do not believe on new product much. In India people usually purchase on trust. In India Trust building is much more important than Brand building. If your solution is very much useful for people then definitely people will buy. But at the same time you need to concentrate on specific customers. As mentality in Urban India and Rural India is different. take example of same Sauce. When you sell your Sauce in Urban India Where people are forward they usually go for Glass bottle for Sauce rather then Plastic bottle. And in Rural India people will buy plastic bottle as they think This are rigid and unbreakable. If someone purchase Sauce for more then one usages They will think that bottle should have thread so that we can close bottle properly. But in India scenario is completely different in India if you create enough trust for your brand then people will buy your product with out looking at its packaging. Example is Kissan Sauce. They have 2 different bottles for bigger bottle they have thread on their bottle as well as on its nob. but for the smaller bottle which people buy for multiple uses does not have thread. This way they are cutting on extra cost. and this is most important thing in an Industry. How you can increase your profit. and profit of 1 Rupee or 1000 Rupees. Profit is always Profit.

My take on this question is you should always look for the market before packaging the solution. Market survey is very important before packaging as it may help in cutting your costs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Manan for such a good post. it really helped me many ways. I am working with Market Analysis company in Dubai, and currently we are working on few projects for India. This posthas really helped me. Keep writing on such topics.