With retailers owning and managing shelf space, brands have little room – literally and figuratively – to make an impact. But, as Toluna’s Liam Gilbert explains, visibility is currency, and packaging is one of the last points in the customer purchase journey to help a brand stand out.
“Typically, the bigger the brand, the more influence it has regarding shelf location and its ability to influence that. Big budgets tend to come out on top there, so where brands can influence, standing out is primarily through their packaging.”
Toluna has three core areas of expertise: Brand engagement (brand, communications and campaign testing); Product innovation (market exploration, testing concepts and packaging); and Custom market research.
According to Gilbert, whose role at Toluna is senior client director, packaging serves two core purposes: Protecting the product and driving purchase.
“Many businesses get caught up in a beauty parade, trying to make their packaging as attractive as possible. But that’s not really the aim of packaging.”
Packaging’s effectiveness is deeply connected to its environment, whether jostling for attention in a physical aisle or standing out on a digital screen.
“It has to be visible and stand out on the shelf, so context is really important.”
In crowded categories like breakfast cereals, even bold designs can get lost in a sea of sameness. “There is a lot of colour and bold activity on shelves. But ultimately, all the packaging looks the same. It’s all structured the same. It’s all either a cardboard box or a plastic bag. So, packaging must be visible with a strong colour that stands out from the crowd. It has to communicate instantly to tell the consumer what it is, who it is for and why you should buy it.”
It has to be easy to find, so if you are a brand with multiple variants or flavours, the shopper can quickly and easily identify the brand and the variant they are looking for. Gilbert sees many examples of packs cluttered with text, shouting numerous claims and messages. Typically, those packs don’t work on the shelf. What works better is being clean, visible, and very quick and easy for the shopper to decipher in normal shopping conditions.”
Colour is the first design element that hits the consumer’s brain. Typically, he says, people process only three or four elements of a pack design before they select or deselect a product, so colour is essential in driving familiarity.
“We all associate Coca-Cola with red or Cadbury with purple. There are cues that people are looking for that are built over time, and colour is really important in signalling and helping people to understand what they’re getting. It’s a distinctive asset, and that’s important.”
But Gilbert warns that even bold choices must respect category norms. One cautionary tale involves sesame milk in China, packed in black cartons, which bombed. “Milk is white. People get it. We differentiate variants by either the colour of the cap or the colour of the label – dark blue, light blue, green, or orange, for example. People don’t associate black with the milk category, underlining the importance of products fitting seamlessly within the context of their category.”
Recognition is critical
In packaging design, recognition is key, he says, and that comes through familiarity, colour, distinctive assets, and not deviating too far away from what people know you for – at the same time as doing enough to potentially drive perceptions of modernity, quality and high value.
Gilbert’s takeaway is that clever packaging design is a process of evolution, not revolution. “The fundamental lesson that runs through the pack testing that we do now is that it’s about evolving your brand and your design to make it fit for the future, potentially attracting new groups, but not diverting too far away from what you’re famous for.”
There are, of course, cautionary tales for those who forget this. He cites the US case of Tropicana more than a decade ago, which changed the font on its packaging and all the distinctive design assets. “It lost $50 million in sales and then made a very quick U-turn to previous packaging, and the brand took a long time to recover. That’s an example of what you don’t want to do. Maintaining familiarity while making your product fit for the future is the key lesson.”
Proof of concept
Toluna has invested in high-fidelity 3D virtual shelf environments to allow for passive measurement of shopping behaviours. “We invite respondents to shop from a virtual shelf, so we can measure whether the product is visible, how easy it is to find, and how long it takes somebody to find it. And we measure purchase as well. So ultimately, you know that the role of packaging is to drive purchase, and we can measure the purchase rates, purchase impact and purchase intent of packaging at the shelf.”
Recently, Toluna tested a rebrand for a well-known Australian grocery brand.
“This is a significant departure, because it’s a well-known and loved brand that has looked the same for a long time. It is a considerable risk to take this journey. We tested two new design routes against the current design, and both performed well.
“We saw an increased propensity to purchase among this target group of shoppers, and then actual increased purchase rates in the testing that we did. That’s an example of where testing in context and testing purchase at the shelf is essential, because this brand is worth millions and millions of dollars to our client. Launching without testing, or launching but testing incompletely, would have potentially risked the viability of sales of that brand,” he concludes.
Imagery plays a huge role in product choice. Gilbert offers the example of pasta sauce brand Mutti, which recently redesigned its packaging.
“The product visual has moved from the side of the jar, where few shoppers saw it, to the front and centre. There’s now a large image of a juicy ripe tomato and parmesan cheese. This helps shoppers in the few seconds they take to make a decision, to see, assess, and understand what they will get from the product more quickly. The packaging helps tell the story of the product’s flavour and promise. It speaks to what it is without people having to read the text on the jar.”
Finally, he advises: Make it clear to the customer what they are getting.
“Typically, we shop on autopilot. We take a matter of seconds to select or deselect from the shelf. So we’re looking for familiarity. We’re looking for those cues that we know. We don’t want to be overwhelmed with information; We want it to be as easy as possible to decide what we want. The more disciplined the pack design is, the better its chance of succeeding.
“Make it clear what the consumer is getting because there is nothing worse than buying something you did not expect to buy.”
