Your Marketing Strategy - Packaging Sells

Your Marketing Strategy - Packaging Sells

A woman “is well dressed if people say, ‘She looked heavenly but I can’t remember what she had on.’”^a —Jackie Kennedy Onassis

MY MOTHER WAS a 1964 fashion plate. Her blonde hair was teased high and shellacked with hairspray, and her foundation garments were always securely in place. She usually added three inches to her height by donning stilettos. We didn’t have much money, but my mom still looked like a million dollars every morning as she headed off to work.

On Saturdays, she’d doll herself up for our weekly trip to the Piggly Wiggly for groceries. By the way she dressed, you’d think President Johnson himself was handing out samples! I don’t remember a single outing when my mother wasn’t appropriately attired.

By the time I was a teenager, I had taken her Mary Kay look for granted—secretly believing that her vanity had the best of her—until she stopped me one day on my way out the door for a date: “You’re not going out like that.” I ran to her bedroom to take in my full view in the mirror but was confused. I was modestly dressed, albeit sloppily.

“What?” I asked.

She said, “Other people have to look at you—be respectful.”

Oh. At sixteen years of age, the light came on and I realized that my attire and how I looked was not only a sign of self-respect, it was also a sign of respect for others. Someone else had to look at me.

Product packaging, like fashion, can be subjective. What is compelling to one person may be atrocious to another. However, liking or not liking a package design rarely hinders sales completely. Unless it is distasteful or offensive. And there lies the rub in our “packaging” today.

Many current fashion trends are inappropriate for young women; inappropriate for the workplace; and, yes—inappropriate for church.

I can hardly believe the report about the sexual immorality going on among you—something that even pagans don’t do. (1 Corinthians 5:1)

Call me old fashioned if you want, but, girlfriends, we have to have a conversation about our packaging and what exactly we’re selling.

^a Shelly Branch and Sue Callaway, What Would Jackie Do? (New York: Gotham, 2005), 47.