Custom bottle glorifiers offer a multitude of benefits for brands, particularly in the beverage domain. Here are the five top benefits.
Imagine you walk into a bar and approach the bar top. Whilst walking towards it you look around to observe the scenery. You notice the people and the furniture. You take in other visual cues and both the sound of music and people chatting with each other.
You reach the bar top and notice a lot of shelves in front of the back wall. These are filled with different bottles. You don’t feel drawn to any bottle in particular. Until you see one which is enclosed within a display, a bottle glorifier. Based on its design, this glorifier beautifully integrates with the bottle. The glorifier drew your attention towards this product.
If not, you would have never even noticed it.
You might have heard about the AIDA model. It is an old model that Elias St. Elmo Lewis developed in 1898! It describes four phases a consumer goes through when engaging with an advertisement: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Nowadays Attention is often replaced with Awareness.
The above first benefit of custom glorifiers, brand visibility, helps to introduce a brand. It catches the attention of people who might or might not turn into consumers of the product. It helps when the consumer has already seen the product before and now only has to recall the brand. Bottle glorifiers can be equipped with LED lighting, sound effects, moving parts or even digital displays. These trigger consumer engagement with the glorifier. Thus a person might be intrigued to find out more about the product.
When a company invests in a standard type of glorifier, it is much harder to connect it to a specific brand world. Yes, compared to a custom glorifier, the investment will be lower. The glorifier won’t speak the exact same language as the brand, though. Custom glorifiers offer design options that will fit what the brand chooses to stand for. What the audience will likely appreciate.
You want your marketing materials to integrate well into your broader marketing activities. It is easier to do that with custom solutions.
When you choose custom bottle glorifiers, you have more flexibility to get the quality right. If you are managing a premium spirit brand, you can’t work with a low quality bottle glorifier. All your branded merchandise needs to be of high quality.
I remember a client who briefed us on a custom bottle glorifier project. He represented a company that was a contract partner of a global premium spirit company. He told me that their client had relied on a lower quality type of bottle glorifier. They had come to the conclusion that it did not move the needle enough for them.
They considered the quality level they had been able to reach to be about 80%. Given the premium positioning of their brand, they needed the glorifier to reach at least what they described as a 95% level. If not they felt it would do more harm than add value to their brand positioning. Once they decided to invest in a redesign, they were able to improve the quality.
Brand visibility, consumer engagement, brand consistency and quality construction. Managed in the right way, these will lead to increased sales. Custom glorifiers trigger impulse purchases at the point of sale. Be it in bars, night clubs, event venues or supermarkets.
It is important to review the impact of the custom bottle glorifiers you are using. Do more consumers try out your product? Has the revenue gone up? Compared to other products you have not placed on a glorifier? Any differences in channels?
A good place to explore custom glorifiers, are retail stores at airports. You will find a range of beverage brands that use custom glorifiers. It is not uncommon for other type of brands to use glorifiers, too, e.g. parfum or cosmetics.
When it comes to custom glorifiers, what options for customisation exist? There are so many options here:
materials: wood, metal, plastics, glass, leather, marble, stone, granite, cardboard, forex, MDF…
colors: green, red, golden, white, black…
shape: square, rectangular, oval, round….
design style: traditional, contemporary, minimal, futuristic, natural…
electronics: motion sensors, lighting, sounds, laser beam…
The number of customisation options can be overwhelming. The best you can do is rely on a professional designer to help you out. Luckily we here at PES have our own in-house product design team. Not only that but product development and engineering team, too. They share an office with our head of production and our head of innovation. Their office is right next to our workshop.
Designer Collaboration
Our designers discuss initial drafts with their colleagues from engineering and production. Before moving forward and developing these more in detail. Some clients have their own designer. Or they collaborate with either a freelance designer or a designer who is part of an agency they work with. In this case our role is to support them with engineering advice and make the product they seek to source.
As with other marketing investments, when you use a custom bottle glorifier, you will want to track its impact. There is the brand marketing and then there is the direct marketing effect. The brand marketing part, e.g. brand awareness, brand recognition and brand trust, is mostly unmeasurable. You hope for the best, that the custom bottle glorifier will help your brand develop. The direct marketing part needs to drive a specific action. In the online world this can refer to clicks or impressions. Custom glorifiers need to drive purchases. This is what you are after.
You measure the increase in sales, over a specific period of time. Then you compare it with the amount of money you have invested. Into the design, the development, the production and the delivery of your glorifier. A Return of Investment calculation will be helpful to determine if the investment was worth it. You will want o compare the percentage with other marketing investment options.
There are different psychological aspects that custom glorifiers address.
Attention: Custom glorifiers are eye-catching. Designers achieve this via color, lighting, motion elements, unique shapes. A unique design will stand out because consumers are attracted towards novelty.
Emotions: Custom glorifiers convey a brand’s story, thus facilitating an emotional connection. Particularly with consumers who are already loyal fans. A positive emotional connection makes consumers more likely to buy the product. Beautiful designs foster positive emotions and a positive mood.
Memory: When a consumer comes across a custom glorifier it helps reinforce the brand. If this is one of several touchpoints, across different channels, it will lead to easier brand recall. The more unique the glorifier, the more memorable it will be. The glorifier needs to glorify the product, not compete with it and take over the show.
Social proof: Quality glorifiers create the impression that the product is popular. This takes advantage of the social proof principle. This principle leads consumers to believe that a popular item must be of a higher quality.
Decision making: By making a product stand out a custom glorifier helps consumers make easier decisions. The visual cues particularly help the yet undecided consumers. They are able to identify a product as a go to option.
Custom bottle glorifiers use principles of consumer psychology to gain attention, build emotional connections, simplify decision-making, and improve the consumer experience. By utilising these psychological factors, glorifiers impact purchasing behavior.
Two things will influence custom glorifiers more than anything else: sustainability and technology.
More glorifiers will be made from recycled and biodegradable materials. Energy-efficient lighting options will be further developed. The number of promotional messages a consumer experiences, will keep on rising. As a result of this, a lot of brands will adopt a minimalist approach to the design of bottle glorifiers. Glorifiers that will convey the message of more is less.
We will see more screens, augmented reality and the collection of consumer data. Brands will manage analytics in real time. Brands will change displayed content and colors in real time. . Trade marketers will be able to adapt custom glorifiers to individual campaigns.
Ivica Baraba
"In PES I get to work on many custom Point of Sales material projects. I’ve been doing this since 2004. It intrigues me to delve into brand worlds and determine what branded merchandise can help a client achieve their business goals. It is an exceptionally creative and dynamic industry to be a part of.”