4 Tips For Food Product Label Design To Attract Customers

by Emily Smith, marketing strategies associate for The Label Company

 Designing a food product label, which captures the attention of your target customers, is exciting as well as challenging. You need to create an attractive design that reflects the food’s essence and your company’s identity. The challenging job for you is to craft a marketable design, which makes your food item stand out of the crowd, and fetches sales.

Designing an attractive, consistent and clear food label is the key to winning hearts. However, the job is no as easy as it sounds. With an increasing number of food products being introduced in the market, what should you do to make your food item get noticed?

Here are some effective tips to design a great label for your food product:

1. Know your audience.

Firstly, determine your target customers and their needs. Know what they are seeking, before even beginning to create the design concepts. What are the problems faced by your target customers, and how can your food item solve them?

A food product label not only does the job of any other product label, but a lot more than that. It should also promote quality and fresh ingredients, sanitary cooking methods, and convey a delicious flavor. It is also important for you to understand the expectations of your audience. You should consider demographics like income level while designing labels.

2. Determine what your label should say.

It’s not possible for you to always sell your food item personally to your target customers, so your label should be able to say what you want to say. Some of the questions that should be answered by your label, are – what kind of food product is it? Who is it aimed at? How should one use it? What kind of taste does it have? What ingredients does it have?, and other such questions.

Often, the design of a label is not thought well, because of which a food item is not stocked by stores that should sell it, or the item remains on the store shelf. Great tasting food products are often missed when the products’ core values are not conveyed effectively.

3. Determine the style of your product – how should it appear.

Illustrations, images, fonts and colors are all a part of your product’s brand appeal. So, you should consider all of them to draw your target customers, which will increase the chances of your food item being picked up from the shelf and bought. Your target customers should understand your product and also recognize that it’s meant for them.

When determining your food product’s style, you should consider these 3 factors:

• Label color:

Your label color should not only be appealing and suitable for the food item, but should also differ from the predominant color scheme of food item labels, against which your product competes. Selecting colors similar to label colors of products similar to yours, may make people ignore your product. So, use a color that is not used by most products placed near yours on store shelves. Naturally, your chosen color should relate to your food product. However, this guideline is not entirely infallible. For example, the color scheme used by labels of most chocolate bars is cream, gold and brown, but labels of Nestle Crunch bar are blue, white and red.

• Label Graphics:

The graphics of your food label should be evocative i.e., it should remind your target customer of something, something good. There are many ways you can evoke a sentiment for your food product, through its label. The thing you should not do is create a graphic so weird that your product evokes no feeling at all, or so uninteresting that the item is easily overlooked.

• Label readability:

You have only three seconds to attract an individual to read your label. The graphics and color of the item should make an individual want to read the label, but he/she will no longer be interested in your product, if the label is difficult to read. When reading text, eye moves from top left towards right, in the west. So, after the name of the product, which should be written in the biggest typeface, the most significant information should be shown clearly, starting in the top right corner, or directly under the product name. This information should be in letters sufficiently clear to be readable from about six feet away.

4. Create a good copy.

The impact of a good copy should not be underestimated when it comes to sale of products. The space for the copy is often limited on labels, and so, you need to be careful with word count. Your copy should tell what your product is, in an attractive, creative and compelling way, in a few words. If your budget allows, consider getting a copywriter’s services for providing wording for the labels of your food products. At least, you can talk to the design agency you have hired, as a different perspective often works well.

By applying these tips in your food product label design, you can create labels that not only represent your quality food products in a great way, but also attract target customers. Follow these label design tips, and see how your food product sales increase.

Emily Smith is a Marketing Strategies associate at The Label Company, a food product label manufacturer in Orange County, CA. She loves to share her thoughts on marketing with other business owners through her writing. She has strong knowledge in food product label strategies. You can follow her on Google+.