How Seasonal Packaging can Drive Business Growth

Changing seasons and calendar events can be an effective way for businesses to increase brand awareness, encourage sales growth and engage their customers.

Below, we’ll take a look at what seasonal packaging is, how it can benefit your business, and how you can partner with Tyler Packaging’s custom digital print technology to create season-specific packaging with a quick turnaround.

Seasonal packaging refers to packaging that nods to a calendar event or time of the year. Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s Day would be the most popular examples, along with religious celebrations such as Eid and Diwali. Less cultural and more thematic examples might include summer holiday or back-to-school campaigns, too.

Whatever it’s tied into, seasonal packaging is a means of generating buzz and increasing sales amongst consumers who might only buy products from you on rare occasions.

With this in mind, it’s about more than just adding Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny to your usual packaging. The best seasonal packaging taps into the emotions of your customers, creates urgency, and still aligns with your brand identity.

Increased brand awareness

The visual element of seasonal packaging has an undeniable appeal, especially when it’s sharing the shelves with products that all look the same. Seasonal events give you the opportunity to add visual flourishes such as foil embossing and bolder colours to your packaging. Altering the structure of the packaging itself with inventive shapes is another way to stand out too, drawing the eye of in-store customers in clever, exciting ways.

Remember, it’s important to make sure your seasonal packaging aligns with your existing branding. You don’t want to alienate your current customer base, or have them miss your products entirely because they don’t recognise the packaging. When designing your seasonal packaging, strike a balance between visuals that look fresh and exciting while still remaining recognisably you.

More product urgency

Limited editions and product runs can drum up excitement. When they know there’s a finite window on the availability of a product (and its packaging), people are driven to purchase it before the window closes. Improve conversions and orders by highlighting the “limited time only” aspect of seasonal packaging.

Limited editions also give you a chance to experiment. Whether it’s new materials, co-promotions, or different visuals, you can test how these decisions perform without having to make a long-term commitment that might disappoint.

Greater loyalty

The range of emotions and senses that seasonal packaging can evoke makes it a highly effective method of building brand loyalty. Depending on the event or season, you can use colours, messaging and visuals to channel feelings of nostalgia, inclusivity, luxury, anticipation and celebration, to name just a few. With the emotional connection they make through your packaging, customers are more likely to keep coming back to your products again and again.

Devise a promotional strategy

As with any business decision, it’s important to lay out a plan for your proposed activity to ensure best results. Ahead of it arriving on store shelves or on your online stores, build anticipation of your new seasonal packaging in the form of email newsletters to subscribers, for example. If there are influencers you can work with, consider approaching them about unboxing your products/packaging in a YouTube video. See if it’s possible to place your products in store areas with lots of footfall to capitalise on impulse purchases.

Tailor the seasons to your industry

Alongside calendar events throughout the year, your own industry is a greater source of inspiration for ideas too. For example, businesses in the Lawn & Gardening industry might choose to alter their packaging colours in line with each season, opting for lighter colours in the spring and darker colours when it’s winter.

For Food & Drink businesses, it makes sense to offer products created from seasonal ingredients – with corresponding packaging to match. Warming ingredients like ginger and pumpkin evoke autumn and winter, for instance, and packaging can easily be created to reflect that.

In the Health & Sports Nutrition industry, meanwhile, you can get creative with packaging based around certain fitness goals. In the winter, people bulk up for the colder months, so you could push packaging tailored to this outcome. In the summer, on the other hand, when people train outdoors, you could opt to create packaging that emphasises the need for hydration and refuelling.

Don’t be overly specific

Christmas packaging might be a no-brainer, but try not to target holidays or events that are too specific. Anything too niche narrows your audience or shortens the lifespan of your packaging, especially if the messaging references specific years. This is where it’s important to know your target customers, so make sure you’re referring back to historical data or buyer personas before making packaging decisions.

Be mindful of stock levels

Similarly, don’t go overboard when estimating how much stock you’ll need of your seasonal packaging. Opting for too much can cause a few different problems for your business. Too much stock can have the opposite effect that you want to create with seasonal packaging i.e. too much visibility, not enough exclusivity.

You might also have to make huge discounts on your surplus stock just to shift it before it’s out of date and unsellable. From a brand position perspective, slashing prices of large amounts of products can be damaging. If this leads to writing off the stock, it could have a negative financial impact on your business.

Make intelligent package decisions

In an age where consumers are more conscious of the role packaging has to play in harming the environment, sustainable choices are vital. To that end, you don’t want to add to the problem by creating additional packaging that’s hard to dispose of or can’t be recycled.

Look to your packaging as an opportunity to think differently – and increase the value of your products. For example, your Christmas packaging might take the form of a gift box that customers can use for storage purposes once they’re done with the contents. As they’ll be keeping hold of your packaging for a longer time, this also helps to keep your brand front of mind too.

Whatever your plans for seasonal packaging are, Tyler Packaging can make them happen. Our recyclable and compostable product ranges help with your sustainability goals throughout the year, while our digital print technology delivers flexible, customisable visuals, with low MOQs and fast turnaround, to keep up with changing demands and plans. My Pouch is also a great way of achieving this, with the opportunity to upload your own artwork too.

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