Packaging Sales and Packaging Techniques

Packaging

Sales and Packaging Techniques

The Target Corporation: Sales promotion and packaging techniques

The Target store is a discount retailer, much like Wal-Mart and Kmart. However, its brand name has an additional cache that its competitors lack. Target has a trendy, fun, yet ever-so-slightly sophisticated reputation: the common, mental image of a Kmart or Wal-Mart shopper is very different than that of a typical Target consumer. This is the result of carefully contrived branding and crafting of the Target name and image. Target's in-store design, product lines, and advertising all demonstrate clearly why Target is often called 'Tar-get,' with a fake French pronunciation by its more upscale clientele. Consumers have a fanatical devotion to Target, not so much the quality of its products, but because of how the products look on the outside and how they make the customer feel. Target's brightly colored and sleek packaging is never purely functional: it is designed to delight the eye, as in the case of its 'prestige' line of makeup, furniture, and clothing. Target is best known for these types of products, rather than more practical items like automotive parts or grocery items. Target stores are divided into comfortable, well-lit aisles to enhance the shopping visit and make going to Target an ambient experience more like mall shopping, not simply a place to get out of as quickly as possible.

Target also often pairs with well-known designers like Isaac Mizrahi to create store-exclusive products. These products are consistent with the familiar Target visual style, as bright and graphically distinctive as the department store's logo: most recently, Target entered into a joint relationship with the famous designer Orla Kiely to produce home decoration products. Consumers can chose from designs in orange, white, green pear or brown floral motifs, all priced from $2.50 to $22 (Schelfo 2009.) While Target products are relatively inexpensive compared to department stores, for a slightly higher price than the bottom-market prices of Wal-Mart, Target customers can purchase the appearance of good taste, and create a more visually enticing environment. The product's cheapness is not immediately apparent, which allows consumers to scrimp on some items at Target while they splurge on others elsewhere yet still create an overall 'quality' image. Target's attractive design is consistent with its 'expect more, pay less' slogan, as well as its eye-catching bulls-eye.

In New York, Target has been anxiously courting Manhattan residents who are not part of traditional American 'big box' department-store shopping culture, Target has been promoting how it offers less expensive items that still have a connection to brand-name designers. Yet Target has not weathered the recession as well as Wal-Mart, given that its focus on home goods and clothing make it less of a draw for consumers who wish to purchase only the barest of necessities. But in places like New York, where style is king, Target hopes to make encroachments into a market segment of consumers who are still affluent, but slightly down-scaling their purchases (Rosenbloom 2008).

As well as cheap yet sophisticated, Target is also fun. Its eye-catching advertisements in bright colors suggest a youthful, hip image that stands in contrast to dowdy, Middle-America associations with Wal-Mart and K-Mart. These ads suggest that shopping at Target is a joyful experience, not a chore. The Target bins filled with $1 items, which could all be roughly classified under the heading 'everything that you don't really need' also act as an incentive to draw consumers to come to Target to shop as a pastime, not merely when they are driven to do so by necessity alone.