Millennials: The largest living generation. Always connected. Highly influential. Devoted brand advocates.

These are your ideal customers, and they want to show off your unique and trendy products to their massive communities of followers. Are you grabbing their attention? Are they ordering your goods and sharing them with friends? Or are you singing their praises into the air, hoping the promotional messages finally stick? 

Product packaging has been proven to serve as the perfect tool for grabbing millennials’ attention in seconds and drawing them to your product, much more effectively than traditional advertising and sales techniques. With new technologies emerging at lightning speed, flexible retail packaging is the tangile object that can link the online world (where millennials spend much of their time) with real-world products. Millennials are visual buyers, sharers and reputation builders. They love products and packaging that look “cool,” but to them, useful is the new cool.

That isn’t to say millennial consumers are shallow — in fact, they crave meaningful connections with the brands they purchase from, and they want the products they buy to fill a need and serve a true purpose in their lives. They’re also more willing to shop from companies that are eco-friendly or support a cause that’s important to them. All of this information can be communicated to consumers in various ways, but printing it on a physical item (like a product’s exterior packaging) is one of the most effective. After all, product packaging is the signature a brand leaves everywhere, and millennials are busy people who are always on the go, providing ample opportunity for brands to get noticed along the consumers daily commute. They see the packaging on social media, spot it in stores and carry it to their destination. Your brand has numerous chances to reach more than 80 million millennial shoppers if your packaging speaks to them and is convenient, attractive and conduscive to their lifestyles.

So, what type of packaging best accomplishes these goals? New advances in flexible retail packaging have allowed brands — ranging from small, mom-and-pop shops to major, established corporations — to wow and inspire the most influential consumer base and encourage them to buy and share products with their massive communities. The majority of this important generation's consumers say they trust a friend’s opinion about a company or product over a brand’s ads, so utilizing functional, high-quality, visually striking packaging is a tried-and-true method for drawing influencers to your product and encouraging them to promote and share it with others.

Millennials are projected to spend $1 trillion on products by 2020, and in such a crowded landscape, today’s CPG brands need to determine how they can stand out and beat the competition. The first step is truly understanding the consumer and creating meaningful connections with him or her. This should then inspire new product development, modern marketing techniques and a packaging refresh. Does your packaging stand up and stand out to millennials?

In our new eBook, “Using Packaging to Tap into the Millennial Mindset,” we provide statistics, data, and an in-depth look into the way millennials communicate, consume content, influence others, and make buying decisions... with packaging serving as the vital connection between a brand’s image and its product offerings.

This FREE guide explores the most modern advances in flexible retail packaging and provides steps to revamp your marketing strategy to build a solid base of loyal, influential brand advocates. Packaging that appeals to millennials canUsing Packaging
 to Tap into the Millennial Mindset help your business gain free promotion and steady word-of-mouth publicity — as long as you’re focusing on the details and staying ahead of the curve. Want to beat the competition and win over millions of important buyers?

Remember: Consumers buy with their eyes, and packaging protects the integrity of your product and brand reputation. Millennials are influencing each other on a daily basis, and they’re looking to brands to help inspire their next move.

(Top Image Source: The Storefront)