The unique preferences of Generation Z: How can customized packaging capture the hearts of young people?

How can packaging design meet the preferences of Generation Z?

 

 

For female consumers, customized packaging is becoming increasingly important in the beauty and scented candle markets. Through customized packaging, brands can create exclusive product experiences for consumers, making each product unique and satisfying consumers' pursuit of personalization. But can customized packaging guarantee that all products will sell well? Although successful customized packaging strategies can bring significant added value to brands, there are still many cases of failed customized packaging designs in the market. These failures are usually caused by insufficient insight into target consumers, technical limitations, poor cost-effectiveness, and inconsistent brand positioning. Want to understand how customized packaging can become a key factor in brand differentiation? Want to master the tricks to successfully create customized packaging? This article will take you to explore in depth and let you stand out in the fierce market competition.

2023-2024 Customized Packaging Market Status and Trend Analysis

1. Market Size

Euromonitor reports that the global customized packaging market has grown steadily at an average annual compound growth rate of 8% in the past five years, and the market size has reached US$15 billion by 2023. Among them, the demand of female consumers in the beauty and scented candles market, especially in high-end beauty brands, is that female consumers prefer customized packaging, which is not just a superficial consumption behavior, but a pursuit of social needs and emotional connection. By deeply understanding the psychology of female consumers, brands can better grasp market opportunities and develop customized packaging to pursue individuality and uniqueness.

 

 

Image source: Send gifts to express your feelings and touch your heart! Customization brings out new creativity

 

 

Image source: Taiwan Beauty Industry Perspective Analysis

 

2. Analysis of Consumer Demand and Behavior

The survey results found that as many as 78% of female consumers said that customized packaging can effectively improve their brand loyalty. In addition, 65% of women are willing to pay more for beautifully designed packaging products. Millennials and Generation Z consumers in particular are more inclined to choose personalized and environmentally friendly products, and they also pay more attention to brands that invest in sustainable development and innovative technologies.

 

Insight into the consumption codes of different age groups

To successfully capture the attention of consumers, brands must understand the consumer psychology of different generations. Female consumers of Generation Z and Millennials pursue personalization and environmental protection, while Generation X values ​​classics and quality. If brands can launch customized packaging that suits the preferences of different age groups, this shows that brands should take into account the differences in needs of different age groups when designing customized packaging in order to effectively improve brand loyalty and stand out in the market.

 

Image source: Taiwan Beauty Industry Perspective Analysis

 

Consumers with higher income levels pay more attention to packaging details

To successfully capture the hearts of different consumers, brands need to have tailor-made customized packaging strategies. For high-income consumers, emphasize the texture, design details and brand story of the packaging.

 

3. Environmental trends

As consumers' environmental awareness rises, Statista data shows that in 2023, environmentally friendly packaging has occupied 22% of the market share in the beauty and scented candle market. In order to capture the hearts of millennials and Generation Z who focus on sustainable development, many brands have adopted biodegradable materials and zero-waste packaging to make products not only easy to use, but also environmentally friendly. (Source: Statista, 2023 Beauty and Scented Candle Market Report)

 

Customized Packaging Case Analysis

1. Jo Malone makes good use of customized technology to turn perfume bottles into private collections

Jo Malone's unique perfume bottle engraving service allows every customer to have a unique perfume. Consumers can engrave their name, a special date or a precious memory on the bottle, turning the perfume into a meaningful personal collection to deepen their connection with Jo Malone.

 

Image source: marie claire

 

2. Beyond fragrance, experience exclusivity: Le Labo's customized fragrance journey

Le Labo has successfully become a brand of customized experience. Le Labo is famous for hand-made fragrances and provides customers with exclusive participation in the purchase process. Each bottle of perfume is prepared on site, allowing consumers to witness the production process with their own eyes and choose the fragrance intensity, raw materials and details according to consumer needs. The most iconic experience is that the personal name and date can be printed on the bottle label, which makes each bottle of perfume a unique product exclusive to the user, further strengthening the emotional connection between the product and the individual. The success factor of Le Labo lies in transforming luxury purchases into an experience. This experience not only emphasizes product quality, but also pays more attention to the process of consumer participation, creating a customized and exclusive shopping experience for each consumer.

 

3. Analysis of the failure of Burberry's limited edition perfume

The failed customized packaging case is a limited edition perfume launched by Burberry. The packaging of this product uses a lot of high-end materials, such as leather and metal, to highlight the brand's luxury style. However, consumers believe that such a design does not meet their expectations of Burberry's "classic British style", and the high price makes it difficult for consumers to accept. Although Burberry tried to launch customized products, its customized experience did not really impress consumers, and ultimately led to sales far below expectations, showing that luxury brands need to think about more details when providing personalized services, and more importantly, they must not deviate from the brand impression that the brand has worked hard to create, so as to avoid giving consumers a sense of confusion of "different personality". Summary of failure case elements:

● Insufficient market insight: Many brands fail to deeply understand consumer needs, resulting in the launch of packaging designs that cannot meet market expectations. For example, the problem of excessive packaging shows that the brand has not fully considered the importance consumers attach to environmental protection, or, as in the case of Burberry, using a lot of luxury elements, but deviating from consumers' expectations of the brand.

● Technology and cost: Some customized functions require highly complex technology. If there is not enough professional knowledge of packaging materials, the design team will easily be overly idealistic when coming up with ideas and ignore the balance of cost control, resulting in the final product failing to attract consumers and making consumers think it is not worth the money, or being overly concerned about costs and resulting in mediocre design, losing the charm value that customized packaging should bring.

 

Future trends in the customized packaging industry

Although customized packaging has become an important key to the growth of the beauty industry, how to strike a balance between cost and customized experience also brings many challenges to brands. With the popularization of technologies such as AI and AR/VR, brands will have more resources to use customized packaging to make the Xiaofan experience more unique. In the future, we can predict that customized packaging will no longer be limited to high-priced brands, but any brand can easily meet consumers' daily needs for uniqueness and bring consumers a better consumer experience. Here we also summarize several possible future trends of the industry for brands.

 

1. Market competition prompts brands to invest more actively

According to the report of NPD Group, the key reason why Jo Malone and Le Labo can stand out among many fragrance brands is that they have a deep understanding of consumer psychology. They invest a lot of resources in value-added services such as packaging design and personalized engraving services to establish emotional connections with consumers. At the same time, some brands are gradually eliminated by the market due to poor cost control or failure to meet consumer needs. Le Labo successfully used AI technology to improve customized services through cooperation with Rosetta.ai, and the conversion rate increased by 20%, successfully attracting countless consumers who value quality. Once competitors actively invest, all brands will move together to make the brand stand out in the competition.

 

2. Technological innovation helps balance costs

Consumers are no longer satisfied with cookie-cutter products, they desire uniqueness. Jo Malone's high-end customization can indeed meet the needs of some consumers, but for the general public, the price threshold is too high. Some mid-range brands cannot make profits when implementing customized sales due to high costs. In the future, with the advancement of technology and the realization of economies of scale, more brands will begin to reduce costs while providing personalized services.

 

3. Integrate digital technology, and customized packaging will become part of the consumer experience

AI and AR/VR, two key technologies, will work together to bring a new interactive experience to the beauty industry. For example, the cooperation between Le Labo and Rosetta.ai is like tailoring a "beauty consultant" for consumers. Through intelligent data analysis, consumers can find products that suit them more accurately, and the shopping experience becomes more interesting. This "technology + beauty" model gives other brands more imagination. Packaging is not only a display of design sense and brand atmosphere, but also a channel for interacting with consumers, superimposing positive consumer experience, and even promoting more subsequent consumption. Today, every consumer desires to be seen, understood, and served in a more meticulous manner. In an extremely segmented and fragmented consumer market, brands satisfy consumers' desire to "be seen" by providing them with customized packaging, just like creating an exclusive gift for them. With the advancement of technology, customized packaging will no longer be a luxury, but an everyday thing within reach. This not only satisfies consumers’ pursuit of uniqueness, but also makes the brand more popular. In the future, customized packaging will bring a new beauty experience to millennials and Generation Z.