The Science Behind Successful Packaging Redesigns

Sooner or later, every product must face it: it gets a new look.

A packaging redesign is an especially exciting moment for marketers. Although the fresh new design is hoped to spark attention, relevance, and marketability of the product, history has shown more than once that it can go disastrously wrong.

You don't have to flip through a retail handbook for long to come across cases of revamped packaging that have caused significant damage to the brand.

The packaging plays a crucial role in grabbing attention in the store, making the brand easily findable, and striking precisely that mental chord that resonates in a purchase decision. And precisely because of this great importance of packaging, there is potentially much to lose when you give an existing package a new look.

In this blog, we therefore take a scientific look at the psychology behind packaging, especially when that packaging is given a new design. What requirements must a package meet? What does this mean for successful redesigns? And how can you investigate in advance whether a redesign will succeed or fail?

An Example of How Not to Do It: Tropicana

Chances are you know it: the Tropicana packaging with the straw stuck in the orange. Although the brand is only found in expat shops in the Netherlands, this logo is etched in everyone's memory.

Clever marketing. Yet a few years ago, Tropicana's marketers decided it was high time to retire the orange and straw as a logo after decades of loyal service. A completely new and modern design was set up. The straw was replaced by a Sunday flute (you know, those juice glasses that have been sitting at the back of your cupboard for years), the font was modernised and rotated 90 degrees, and the orange was nowhere to be seen.

Sales Plummeted by 20%

After the introduction of the packaging, Tropicana's sales plummeted. Overnight, the sales volume dropped by 20%.

For Tropicana's management team, this was reason to intervene. Within 6 weeks, the former packaging was back on the shelf and the sales quickly recovered.

The Tropicana redesign reveals an important lesson on how dramatically redesigns can go wrong. But what exactly went wrong? To understand that, we need to grasp the three basic functions of packaging:

• Noticeability. To what extent does the packaging spontaneously stand out? Where the original Tropicana packaging contained high contrast, an edible object, and an easily readable design (all three conducive to spontaneous attention), this was considerably less with the new packaging.
• Findability. Our brain is lazy. When we are looking for a brand, it should stand out effortlessly. However, the new packaging has pushed aside many existing distinctive features of the Tropicana brand. As a result, the shopper has to make more effort to find the packaging.
• Purchase Activation. Finally, the packaging must consciously or unconsciously communicate positive value to activate a purchase. Where the existing packaging strongly associated with freshness (due to the presence of the orange), the new packaging showed an unusual glass from which only 1% of the population would actually drink.

How to Predict the Success of a Redesign

As we saw in the previous section, every packaging faces the same three challenges: Stand out. Brand recognition. Purchase activation.

Every product and packaging design that reaches the checkout owes this to its ability to stand out, activate the brand, and evoke desire. Unravel summarises these three success indicators of packaging in the Three Steps to Purchase™ model.

When you give a package a new look, you want to know exactly how your new packaging compares to the existing packaging on the three success dimensions.

Until recently, the noticeability, findability, and purchase activation of a package were not well measurable. You can indeed ask about it, but traditional research methods are too slow and rational to reveal much meaningful about something as unconscious and emotional as packaging. Neuromarketing research has provided a suitable research solution for several years and is the most accurate predictor of packaging success before the product hits the shelves.

Noticeability (=spontaneous attention)

Measurement Method: Eye Tracking

Sales begin with the battle for attention. Successful products automatically draw the eye. Through Eye Tracking, we can measure this process. By showing a shelf and allowing the shopper to make a free choice, we measure the extent to which your product stands out when people look around freely.

Unravel's Eye Tracking equipment is considered the most advanced of its kind, measuring 128 times per second where the customer's eyes are focused. This way, we map out the attention value of your product with extreme precision.

Findability (=goal-directed attention)

Measurement Method: Eye Tracking and Distinctive Brand Asset Research

The findability of your packaging is the extent to which your product stands out when people are actively looking for it. This goal-directed attention can also be measured with eye tracking, by measuring the speed with which people can locate the packaging.

Brand recognition is supported by the use of distinctive brand assets on the packaging. Brand Assets are the (often visual) properties that are unique and distinctive to your brand. Think of logo, colour, typography, packaging shape, slogan, etc.

If you want to know in advance which of your brand assets are leading in the recognisability of your brand (and which you can safely adjust), it is useful to have a distinctive brand asset research conducted at Unravel Research.

Value Communication & Purchase Activation

Measurement Method: EEG

One package is simply more attractive than another. Where this degree of unconscious desire could not be measured until recently, neuromarketing research with EEG now offers the first objective method to map the attractiveness of a package. EEG is a method to measure brain activity comfortably in realistic settings.

As soon as our eye falls on a package, our brain makes a judgment within 400 milliseconds whether the package is worth further inspection. This lightning-fast desire response can only be measured with the high measurement speed of EEG.

EEG comfortably measures 256 times per second what is going on in the respondent's brain. Thus, we not only measure the desire performance of the overall package but also dissect the exact emotional impact of each visual, claim, and other information.

Want to Read More About Neuromarketing Packaging Research?

Neuromarketing research with Eye Tracking and EEG forms the designated combination of methods to predict whether your packaging redesign is on the right track. It is also very suitable for testing multiple design routes in advance to select the most promising one.

Click here to learn more about neuromarketing research for packaging.