Why package is important? Companies are interested in package as a tool to increase their sales and reduce promotional costs.

How would you know if your package design is a success or a failure?

Packaging is the main communicator at POS that can result in a physical relationship with a target audience. It has 100% opportunity to communicate value proposition is an essential environment - when the need arises.
What qualities should a really successful packaging have? For sure, a good package has great noticeability among the competitors, it should be easily recognizable, packaging needs to correlate with the brand emotionally, and it should not look too cheap not to harm the brand itself.

When developing new packaging or upgrading an existing one, marketers must first find the right balance between novelty (grabbing attention on the shelf) and familiarity (new packaging should keep an association connected with the 'old', existing brand that consumers already know). Our brains are naturally curious and on the look for new things. But too much novelty may overwhelm and destroy the bridge with brand similarity. We used to trust familiar things and make decisions based on what's most familiar to us. That’s why too much novelty eventually can lead to product rejection.

Differentiation (stand out on the shelf) can be measured by the extent to which a product triggers bottom-up attention (involuntary attention that isn't consciously directed by the viewers) when viewed in the context of competing products. A good package helps to identify and recognize the brand to the consumers.

Thanks to CoolTool Neuro solutions, you could improve your packaging design, make it more eye-catching and persuasive for customers, and establish connections with pre-existing needs and goals. Let’s see how you can apply various neuromarketing tools in order to make packaging design as good at attracting customers as possible.

Packaging layers

Packaging is a multidimensional thing, which as a rule consists of three parts – outer, inner layers, and product packaging itself. Thus, when choosing colors for every layer, be sure that they form a harmonized perception of the product by the consumer.

Color plays an increasingly important role in identification and brand recognition. The right choice of colors is an important factor in:
1. Drawing the attention of consumers.
2. Making apart one brand\product from another (establish corporate color).
3. Influencing brand perception.

Why is the traditional survey not enough to test packages? Color is 100% subconscious ‘code’, it works on an implicit level. It requires little mental resources to process visual stimuli, this process always occurs automatically. The instant response is so fast that consumers are not able to "catch" this process; therefore, they don’t perceive it as an influencing factor on a conscious level.

Packaging design

The design of the package itself can have a major influence on the choice of the color range. Square packages with sharp angles rendered in darker colors will be perceived as something powerful and exclusive, while round shapes painted in pale shades will create an opposite impression and make you think about something fragile and tender. You can also play with different package/colors variations using the product shelf testing in order to see whether your product differs from competitors’ and attracts enough attention.

Text related stuff

Consumers do not like to be forced to think longer than needed. It requires the involvement of additional mental effort (System 2).

That's why this is the main challenge of the text element on the packaging. The text is decoded and processed by System 2 (words decoding (reading) --> analysis of information--> determining the value (‘Do I need this?’).
Since the text is aimed to convey an important message that affects the purchase, it is essential to attract the respondent's attention to it. The triggers for attracting attention at an implicit level are font style, size, and contrast (distinguishability among other elements).

Using the eye-tracking, you can understand:
1) whether the text attracts attention (percentage of users who looked at it);
2) how much attention the respondent paid to the text (time of the gaze fixation on it);
3) the order of viewing elements (Time to First Fixation data shows which elements were noticed first, second, etc. The less time is spent before the fixation of gaze on an individual element, the better eye-catching potential).

Feedback

If you did all you could while choosing the color and design of your packaging, and conducted several studies but are still hesitant about whether it will “hit the target”, then just ask your customers directly if they like it or not. Sometimes, good old surveys can provide you with pretty useful and unexpected insights.

The choice of design patterns heavily depends on a number of factors. Though, the good thing is that you can measure all of them using our simple and effective neuromarketing tools. Test your product packaging using eye-tracking, implicit tests, or even emotion measurement to improve the effectiveness of your design and color research. It makes sense to use emotion measurement only if the packaging is designed to evoke emotions - funny animals, cute children, scary Halloween-style clowns, etc. For ordinary packages, emotions are usually neutral. Although emotional measurement is optional for packages themselves, you can still measure emotional response to check whether a package increases consumer loyalty toward the brand. The good news is that we provide access to online panels that enable you to find a target audience, launch a research project, and receive results within a couple of hours and just with several mouse clicks.