Nowadays, businesses are increasingly aware of the potential and the advantages of product customisation and personalisation. When companies get customisation right, it can boost customer proximity and even give consumers the impression that the product was developed especially for them. Indeed, customisation has become a means of stimulating customer fidelity and increasing confidence in brands. When suitably researched and implemented, product customisation can also even form lovemark brands, which refers to a brand’s ability to attract and enamour the target market. At SP Group, we want to help you understand why you should start customising your products.
THE ADVANTAGES OF PRODUCT CUSTOMISATION
In most markets, any given product is almost always available in many different options. Unless you are lucky enough to work in a very specific niche market with very specific products, you will most likely have to compete against other brands. One of the best ways of doing this is to use customisation as a means of differentiating your product from the competition. There are a number of additional advantages to this, including the ones mentioned below.
BOOSTING THE NICHE MARKET
Customisation often presents an opportunity to create designs for different types of target audiences. It is an excellent way of using different styles to reach more people. If a business works hard enough on its creative side, products can begin to appeal to an audience that would not previously have thought of buying them.
Towns, cities and regions also tend to have their own special dates on the calendar and the characteristics of those events can be highlighted through customisation. This is a great way for producers to demonstrate that they think local.
IMPROVED BRAND IMAGE AND INCREASED SALES
Improved branding or brand image is another of the huge advantages of product customisation. In fact, some surveys, such as the one carried out by McKinsey, suggest that 76% of consumers are more inclined to buy brands that have a customised option. This translates into increased confidence in the brand, greater customer loyalty and, consequently, more sales.
This tendency has also been confirmed by other consultancy companies, such as Deloitte, in their studies. They have identified the fact that, on average, the response to customised publicity campaigns is 36% better than campaigns with no customisation at all.
THE ADVANTAGES OF PRODUCT CUSTOMISATION: A GREATER UNDERSTANDING OF THE TARGET AUDIENCE
At an analytical and trend sampling level, one of the most stand-out advantages of product customisation is a greater understanding of the target audience. In other words, customisation helps companies to understand their customers’ predominant tastes and characteristics, and this in itself also includes many other advantages. On the one hand, it helps businesses to anticipate current trends and make appropriate goods and services available to their audience. In addition, by saving clients’ personal preferences, it is possible for companies to make much more accurate recommendations regarding other products.
EXAMPLES OF BRAND CUSTOMISATION
Taking a look at how big businesses go about creating product customisation is a great way of understanding its advantages. They all benefit from a great position in the market and this is largely thanks to customisation.
FONTVELLA: A LEADING EXAMPLE OF SUSTAINABLE CUSTOMISATION
Fontvella, the bottled water company, has used packaging customisation on several occasions in its marketing campaigns. One good recent example is the design the company used for the Mercé festivities in Barcelona, which was created specifically with the inhabitants of Barcelona in mind.
And it is not the only example. One of the company’s most successful campaigns involved using Star Wars character designs on its packaging. When ‘The Force Awakens’ was released, Fontvella decided to dress their bottles up as characters, such as Yoda and Darth Vader, which actually turned them into potential collectibles. They also made the most of this customisation campaign to launch a competition on social media which asked customers to upload photos of themselves with the product. It was undoubtedly a great marketing stunt designed to help the brand to go viral.
KINDER CHOCOLATE AND THE ADVANTAGES OF PRODUCT CUSTOMISATION
Fontvella is a good example of customising products for a specific audience, but the makers of Kinder chocolate have taken customisation to another level with a personalisation option.
This company allows consumers to add a name and photo to the packaging to turn it into an entirely unique design made exclusively for one person.
This promotion activity has helped the company to gain a great deal of visibility on social media and made consumers talk positively about it.
But they are not the only ones to have reaped the benefits of product customisation. Coca Cola and Nutella have also used this new marketing technique to their advantage and have managed to improve their brand image even more.
HECTOR KITCHEN AND PERSONALISED PACKAGING FOR PETS
Product customisation and its advantages are not limited to just one specific area or niche; they can be appreciated across many different brands. Hector Kitchen is a petfood company and also another great example of making good use of personalisation to reach a wider audience. Their product packaging can be personalised on the webpage and this has helped their publicity campaigns to go viral and has improved customer loyalty among existing clients.
Specifically, their packets of croquettes and dogfood purchased online can be delivered with the pet’s name on them. This is a very unique way of suggesting to their clients that the food they make is designed specifically with their pet in mind. Furthermore, the area of the packaging which can be customised also includes information about the expiry date and the order itself. This is a very clever way of employing customisation to make good use of the space on packaging.
Clearly, there are many different ways of making the most of packaging customisation and personalisation, and the sky is the limit when it comes to companies using their imagination to put it into practice. There are also many different ways of customising packaging. One of the best ways is by using a digital printing system. In addition to the aforementioned advantages, digital printing increases flexibility during production and it has the most customisation options. You can use this method to print a digital file onto any package or product. At SP Group, we would like to help you find out more about what customisation can do for your business in our free, downloadable digital printing guide.
