The most common packaging redesign request is to make the product look more premium without changing the price, the positioning or the channel. That is not a design problem with a design solution. It is a pricing decision nobody wants to make.
The most common brief I receive, almost word for word:
"We want it to look more premium."
It is a completely reasonable thing to want, and it is almost never a design brief. Because the follow-up questions usually reveal that the price is not changing, the positioning is not changing, and the product is going to sit on the same shelf, in the same channel, next to the same competitors.
Under those conditions, "more premium" means "the same product, with a more expensive-looking package, at the same price." Which is a real thing you can execute. It just does not do what the person asking for it wants it to do.
Premium visual signals only convert when the buyer already has a reason to pay more. The package cannot supply the reason.
What is actually being asked
When someone asks for premium, they are usually describing a symptom and proposing a treatment in the same breath. Underneath, it is nearly always one of four situations - and each one has a different correct response.
"Our margins are too thin." This is a pricing and positioning problem. Packaging can support a price increase by making it feel justified, but the price has to move for the packaging to have anything to justify. New packaging at the same price just costs you more per unit and lowers your margin further.
"We're losing to a competitor who looks better." Possibly a design problem - but check whether you are losing on shelf position, promotion depth or distribution first. Those are more common causes and no package fixes them.
"We're embarrassed by it." Legitimate and worth acting on. Internal confidence affects how a sales team sells. But be honest that this is the reason, because it changes the success criteria entirely - the brief is coherence, not conversion.
"We want to enter a different channel." The clearest and most actionable version. Moving from farm-gate to grocery, or from grocery to specialty, is a genuine change in competitive context, and the packaging genuinely has to change with it. This is a real premium brief and it is the rarest one.
The reason this matters: three of those four situations produce disappointment if you treat them as a straightforward design job. The design gets executed well, it looks better, and nothing happens to the numbers - because the constraint was never the packaging.
Premium is a relationship, not a look
There is a persistent belief that premium is a set of visual moves. Matte black. Gold foil. Serif typography. Uncoated stock. More white space.
Those are conventions of premium in certain categories, and conventions are useful shorthand. But they signal premium only when the rest of the proposition agrees with them. A $4 product in $12 packaging does not read as a bargain. It reads as confusing, and confusion at the shelf is expensive.
Premium is the gap between what someone expects to pay and what they think they are getting. Packaging can widen that gap by making the value more legible. It cannot create value that is not there, and shoppers are considerably better at detecting the difference than the industry likes to admit.
The brands that successfully move up have almost always changed something real first - the formulation, the sourcing, the size, the channel, the story that justifies it. The packaging then makes that change visible. In that order.
The four questions I ask before quoting
I have started running every redesign conversation through these before anyone talks about design. They take about twenty minutes and they save months.
1. What is changing besides the packaging? If the honest answer is nothing, we are decorating, and we should agree on that up front so nobody is disappointed by the results.
2. What does this need to beat, and where? Name the specific competitor, in the specific store, on the specific shelf. "The category" is not an answer. The competitive set is two metres wide.
3. What has to stay recognizable? Existing customers have equity in something - a colour, a shape, a mark. Identify it before you redesign, because the fastest way to lose a base is to remove the thing they navigate by without realizing it was the thing.
4. How will we know if it worked? Velocity, distribution, price realization, something. If the only measure is whether the leadership team likes it, the project has no failure condition and will be judged on taste.
That fourth one is where most redesign projects quietly fall apart. Not because the design was bad - because nobody agreed in advance what success looked like, so the loudest opinion in the final review becomes the standard.
Test it against the thing you actually fear
There is a discipline in CPG worth borrowing: before committing to a redesign, test purchase intent against the current pack with real shoppers. The rough benchmark being used is that a new design should outperform the existing one meaningfully - some practitioners use a 2:1 margin on purchase intent - or it should not launch.
That threshold sounds harsh until you consider the alternative. A redesign that performs the same as the old one has cost you tooling, plates, inventory write-off and six months, in exchange for nothing. A redesign that performs slightly worse has done real damage, and it is a category of failure that happens far more often than gets discussed publicly, because nobody publishes the case study where the rebrand lost 8% of velocity.
Testing is not a lack of conviction. It is the thing that lets you have conviction.
The version of this brief that works
Compare these two.
"Make it look more premium."
"We're moving from farm-gate to specialty grocery in September. On that shelf we're the only Canadian producer and the second-highest price. Existing customers know us by the blue. We need to be legible at three metres, justify a $2 premium over the import next to us, and keep the blue."
The second one is not longer because it is more detailed. It is longer because someone made four decisions before writing it. Every one of those decisions constrains the design, and constraints are what make a designer useful rather than decorative.
The brief is the job. If the brief is a feeling, you get a feeling back.