These magazines are an absolute invaluable source to me, and I always find what I'm looking for. The articles give a decent depth of understanding too. Every issue is dedicated to a certain aspect of design, and I just happened to find ones for both print and packaging.
I scanned these strategies for success when creating packaging as I know it's relevant to what 
I am doing. It starts with an introductory section discussing the importance of packaging in terms of marketing and then moves on to deliver ten ways to improve marketability, protecting your product and its packaging from plagiarism.
In the article elmwood, the company who provided the strategies, say
"There's an old saying that: 'You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.' This is a perfect packaging metaphor, because the fundamental truth is that the final purchasing decision is made at the shelf edge in store."1. Make your product stand out. Any competitive market can have any number of similar products with different packaging. How will you make the consumer take note of yours.
2. Break with convention. This tip points out ways to stand out through the use of shape and colour. They use 'Innocent' drinks as an example of using a white packaging base to stand out from colourful competitors.
3. Products with Purpose. Here Elmwood say that consumers have taken a dislike to huge companies who have a massive range of products, and they would rather buy the products of those who focus their time to one market area and take care of the consumer through doing so. Examples such as bottled water throw up ethical issues, because it is flown all over the world rather than being naturally sourced. Donations to charity from sales seems to win consumers over too.
4. Add personality Giving a product a personality through its packaging is important as it engages the consumer. The use of language and imagery to tell a story is given as an example.
5. Feel-good factor Making a consumer feel good about what they are buying is key to building brands and putting a smile on the consumers face will make them more inclined to buy your product.
Keep it simple. This tip is straight forward. Considerations of legibility and not over complicating packaging is a must.
7. Tiered branding. Relates to brand heirarchy and splits products down to deliver cheaper products as well as premium products.
8. The cost of transport. This relates to eradicating un-needed packaging so a bigger volume can be transported at one time. Ikea is a classic example of this who distribute their products in flat packaging to save space and 'ship less air'. This also relates to ethical issues too because of emmissions.
9. Speed to shelf. This point relates to how quickly your product is to be stocked on shelf. If you can save the shop assistant time by making your transport packaging also your display packaging then everyone is happy.
10. Protect Yourself. This tip relates to protecting your packaging with patents if its a fresh idea and you deem it neccessary.
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