Therefore, any changes should be carried out wisely without shooting from the hip, not based on personal impressions. Never base your decisions on personal impressions or feelings without confirming them with facts. This increases the risk of a sales growth decrease. A business can go into a tailspin, from which it will be very difficult or impossible to exit, if there is no required resource to eliminate the error.

In fact, the process of sales decrease has already begun in the company. This is not difficult to identify the root cause of it.

Today I will tell you how to carry out the activities for changes, which will lead to sales increase, but not to the losses.+

But taking rash actions is also dangerous for your business in this situation. Do you have enough time and money to fix the mistake?

There are several pitfalls that you may not be aware of.

And I believe that you would like these indicators in your business to constantly increase.

Why do I use these indicators? I talked about it in detail in the article “How packaging design affects sales growth”. What is most, the key parameter that causes the other three is the product purchase frequency at store.

Therefore, while conducting an audit, you need to get an answer to the question — what is the reason of reducing your product purchase frequency. You should get facts and figures, but not someone’s thoughts.

Audit by our methodology “Three layers of efficiency” ™ shows which way we will go — rebranding or redesign. I will return to the description of the audit and its ability to determine the right way. Now I would like to explain you what each process is and what is it affect on.

All these mistakes can be eliminated by developing a brand platform and creating a design that will convey to your consumer the benefits and advantages of your brand.

Also there are other reasons. One lies in the market and is less common, but has huge effect.

Change in consumption trend. This happens at regular intervals. One acquaintance of mine, who lives in the center of St. Petersburg, said: “Before in the nineties, I constantly saw young people drinking alcohol in our yard, but now, on the contrary, everyone has started jogging and playing sports on the street.” Indeed, there has been a reduction in alcohol consumption in the country. People are increasingly taking care of themselves. You do not even remember those vodka brands that have become a thing of the past and will no longer return. Only those who really were of value to people and had a strong brand and significant market share remains of the old ones. It is interesting, in the wake of self-care, a new trend appears — organic vodka. The king is dead — long live the king!

Another reason is Changes in brand development strategy. It happens that you had some kind of hypothesis for brand development. For example, your product was based on the needs of “Energy and Freedom” (the term needs “Energy and Freedom” is taken from our tool for creating brand positioning “Growth Platform” ™).

“Growth Platform” ™ wheel illustration

For some time, you have been producing a product, communicating to the consumers the values, which met the product’s need. But after analyzing the market, competitors and consumers, comparing this data with your product launch capabilities, you realized that by adjusting the recipe, taste and packaging, you can transfer the brand to another need, for example, “Individuality” or “Pleasure,” which in the future will increase your margin and ensure sales. In this case, the target audience of the brand and product is changing. Along with it, the brand’s strategy, its values, benefits and advantages, as well as all visual communications, are changing.

It makes no sense to do it if everything remains the same. In this case, no one will respond to your changes. Do not immediately change the design if you have not yet decided on the brand strategy. You just create another picture that will not communicate anything to your customers. Even if it receives the most prestigious design awards, it does not mean anything. Creative rewards are not related to commercial results. I have never seen representatives of retail or manufacturing entrepreneurs in the jury of ad festivals. Therefore, creative work is judged by creators who are so far from commerce and from those target audiences for which we create products. Therefore, if you ignore research on the brand at the beginning of the project, and start with the development of the design — 99.8% that you will lose, and 0.02% — you may be lucky and you get it. Remember that the cost of a mistake here is too high. And this is not just what you have spent on design development, but how much you will spend later: the costs of packaging, product, logistics, listing in networks, retro bonuses. Sum it all. Do you have time and money to fix this mistake?

Redesign (restyling) — restart or update of your design. When to apply it?

As you already understood from the last paragraph, we start designing when your brand is “formed”. This is very crucial!

The commercial design in question has one function — to lead the consumer to purchase your product, and this design is a part of the communication of your brand with your customer. You have understood your target audience, you have exactly established the brand value, you already have a product that meets the value you have stated. You transmit all this with the help of design. If you cannot formulate these, then your design is just a picture and it will not lead to purchase. Here you need a rebranding!

If you clearly understand and determine the value and benefits of your brand for your customers, but you are not happy with the sales — you need a redesign, because you have communication problems. And the most common reason is mistakes while you have developing packaging design.

The former brand creator or you yourself made mistakes at the beginning, which led to a decrease in sales volume that affected market share and revenue decrease. What mistakes can be:

Another reason is that your design is slightly outdated. Take a look at famous brands logos and packaging, you will see how they have changed over time. We consumers may not even have noticed any changes, but if we compare the first and current designs of brands with a long history, the difference is dramatic.

And although a correctly created commercial design made according to the “Three Layers of Efficiency” ™ method, which has the developed “Visual”, “Contextual” and “Conversional” layers, has a long life span, still there is a time factor. And there are no clear recommendations after how many years you need to change the design. It all depends on your target audience and consumption trends.

Almost all the designs that we developed for a conservative audience aimed at traditional products and traditional consumption have existed for more than 8 years and still bring money to their owners. In products for children or for innovators / individualists (the term audience segmentation by VCGG, which we use in our projects), trends change faster, and this entails more frequent design changes.