Target Audience

Each issue, three designers answer a question from a reader. This month’s question:

How does target audience influence packaging design — both its aesthetics and its functionality?

Marc Rosen

Marc Rosen is president and chief executive of Marc Rosen Associates, ACCESSmr and Horizon Beauty. An award-winning (seven FiFi’s) designer in the areas of fragrance, skin care and make-up, he is also a professor at Pratt Institute, teaching the graduate course in designing fragrance packaging. A trustee at Pratt, he received an honorary doctorate in 2002. Rosen has created bottles for Karl Lagerfeld, Perry Ellis, Ellen Tracy, Elizabeth Arden Red Door, Nina Ricci, Guess and Jill Stuart. He is the recipient of the 2004 FiFi award for the packaging of his fragrance, Shanghai. www.marcrosenassociates.com.

A: Target audience affects design very much, especially if it’s focused on age. Britney Spears fragrance packaging, for example, is very different than Sarah Jessica Parker’s. Besides the age difference, Sarah is sophisticated and since her show appears on premium channel HBO, she’s appealing to a more affluent audience. Britney Spears is a pop princess — she has to be fun and trendy and so does the fragrance packaging.

If it’s a fashion designer fragrance, Ralph Lauren’s Pure Turquoise, for example, it has to be custom and appeal to an affluent audience. Target audience definitely affects the cost of goods and price points. You could do stock packaging if it’s a more popular appeal celebrity fragrance.

The opposite side of the coin, to play devil’s advocate, today everything is blurred because distribution is so different. It used to be that the department store fragrance could only be found at department stores. You can now buy the same products in departments stores that you can buy in Target or Wal-Mart. This is creating a much broader audience – demographics are blurred. Women today are so busy. They may be Sax Fifth Avenue clients, but they may only have time to buy in Wal-Mart on the weekends, while they are picking up other things for home and family. What does this mean for package design? It means that you need to create something that’s going to trade up for your broader audience and will be on target for the audience that you are appealing to, but not so sophisticated that the audience will not get it.

Glyn Eppy

Glyn Eppy is president of TheDesignSpot, a design and branding company located in the heart of New York City’s Flatiron District with a team of award-winning designers and creative thinkers who specialize in building beautiful brands. They’re experts at creating and executing unusual packaging and identity pieces, with an emphasis on skin care, personal care, cosmetics and fragrance. TheDesignSpot handles everything from the big picture to the tiniest detail. www.thedesignspot.net.

A: Target audience influences package design greatly. Whether we are designing packaging for a target audience that is divided by age, demographics or economics, the look, feel and messaging need to be handled differently. Products that are sold in the mass market need to get their brands’ message across almost instantly, as hurried consumers rush up and down the aisles, leaving them only seconds to choose the products that they wish to purchase. These consumers usually make their purchase decisions on their own, guided only by aesthetics and product copy. Products that are packaged in distinctive shapes stand out in a crowd, as do packages that are just clean and simple with interesting graphics. I think that both Dove and Neutrogena’s packaging reaches its target audience very well, by combining aesthetics, functionality and a clear message.

In the prestige market, consumers are usually assisted with their purchase decisions by salespersons, where the aesthetic and perceived value of a product usually drives its purchase. Here, products that are packaged in more upscale, custom packaging are more likely to grab the consumers attention. Brands like Benefit and Philosophy have both accomplished this with great, original packaging designs that reach their target audiences well.

Amy Zunzunegui

Amy Zunzunegui is the director of product development for Urban Decay and Hard Candy Cosmetics. Urban Decay Cosmetics describes itself as “beauty with an edge…feminine, a little bit dangerous and a lot of fun.” Hard Candy Cosmetics is tailored for the young and fresh trend-setter with a “style that’s meant to be seen.” www.urbandecay.com and www.hardcandy.com.

A: When designing a package, one of the most important considerations is your customer. Christian Dior, for example, has an existing customer base from its jewelry line. It has successfully brought that customer over to its cosmetics line with new signature pieces, like the Dior Princess Rings (wearable rings that container either eye shadow or lip color). By adding these extra shiny, weighted metal components to its line, the company has tied in both the cosmetics and fashion/jewelry markets with one product. Dior has targeted its core customer.

When we launched the Hard Candy Take Out Makeup Kit this spring, it was a huge hit. We took a palette that was successful from holiday 2004 and put a new spin on it. We updated the actual make-up by pulling from the top-selling shades in our core line. The package also became brighter and more fun and also grew up a bit, as compared to previous kits. The idea was that this was an all-in-one kit created for a girl on the go. It was something that could be taken with the customer at all times, given its size and product assortment. Thus, we called it the Take Out Kit. The outer packaging resembled a Chinese take out container which ended up being the main draw of the kit.

Our goal with Urban Decay is to stay ahead of the trends and to give our customer something that is not traditionally mainstream. This method has worked well for us in the past given our edgier, trendier customer base. When we launched the Shadow Box 2005 last holiday, we took a bit of a risk in placing a pink skull and crossbones appliqué onto a bright silver paper palette. The skull and crossbone symbol is something that is representative of Urban Decay’s edginess. However, we had never used it so boldly on packaging. After some internal debate on whether the skull would be appropriate for cosmetics, we decided to move forward with the appliqué given that we thought it would really resonate with our customer. It turned out to be one of our most successful palettes. In the end, our team went with our gut instinct based on what we thought our customers would respond to, and it worked.