TakeAway: Packaging is an important purchase decision factor when consumers are at the store, ready to buy.
A great product with poor packaging might be passed over for a sleeker packaged alternative.
That’s why several brands are turning to eye tracking research to gauge how consumers’ eyes fixate on products across a shelf category.
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Excerpted from Brandchannel, “The Eyes Have It: Brands Conduct Staring Contest With Consumers,” by Barry Silverstein, November 30, 2010
It sounds like science fiction, but the best way to know whether or not consumers find brand packaging appealing may be to look into their eyes. It turns out that consumer brand companies like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson are doing just that.
Testing new brand packaging or a new product with consumers has always been a high-risk proposition. Focus groups, surveys, and other traditional consumer research techniques offer some insight, but they are hardly definitive.
Companies with millions of dollars invested in brands want a more accurate assessment of whether or not a product will resonate with a consumer.
Christian Simms, associate director of consumer market knowledge for P&G’s Herbal Essences and Pantene brands, tells Packaging World, “What consumers say and what they react to is a very different thing than what they spontaneously react to. We’re interested in what they can tell us without saying it to us.”
That’s why P&G uses eye tracking research for answers. Eye tracking is not a new science. It has been used for over twenty years in the military and for medical applications. …
In a typical eye tracking experiment, an individual consumer is shown, for example, 6-foot wide store shelves on a screen. The consumer views the shelf categories in this simulated shopping environment. Using a joystick, the consumer moves from one category to another. While she’s doing so, her eye movements are being recorded at 60 readings per second.
The collected data is used to create a heat map of fixation readings; the more intense the color in the heat map, the higher the number of viewing fixations. The data is also analyzed so that the marketer knows the percentage of consumers who “actively fixated” on each product or brand on a shelf. …
Edit by DMG
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