In This Issue

Consider facial coding for understanding consumer experiences Packaging is tangible, quite honestly, to such an extent that words can't readily follow. For example, the typical purchase "decision" takes merely 0.8 seconds at a grocery store.

Shape is moving beyond a decorative whim If packaging is essential in marketing your brand, pay attention to shape as you attend trade shows and conferences this fall.

Package Gallery

Sophisticated labels flex marketing muscle: two examples

By Jim George, Editor-in-Chief

When you think of the label's potential broadly, it can wield marketing muscle as a sophisticated and strategic weapon that offers brand managers another way to justify investments in packaging to senior management as a core element of product-marketing efforts. Why? The label's value advances beyond its traditional role as a decorative add-on.

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Consider these two examples:

• Labels on bottles of Honest Tea provide disruption in the crowded and visually "noisy" ready-to-drink tea aisle. The labels are visually "quiet" and communicate product authenticity as an organic beverage.
• When Wal-Mart reduced the shelf space for the Anacin Advanced Headache Formula brand, Insight Pharmaceuticals removed the carton and introduced a full-wrap, extended-text label. All previous information is included on the label, and the brand gets visual "pop." The costs of folding cartons and inserts are eliminated.

Bottled beverages, says Seth Goldman, Honest Tea Co. President, often lose consumer trust by overpromising about the product. Honest Tea Co., working with Moxie TM, calls attention to the authenticity of its Honest Tea's USDA-Certified Organic ingredients. The label promotes the organic message.

"It starts with the product," Goldman says. "It has to be what the package says it is."

The film label's white background helps distinguish the brand from the sea of color across the category, notes Tammy Vaserstein, Moxie TM Principal. White connotes freshness and simplicity, whereas too much color says "artificial" rather than "organic," she adds. The label's black border visually anchors the product line. Simple typography matches the brand's promise, and luscious fruit illustrations, each with "T," add to the fresh organic appeal, identify each flavor variety, and contrast the white background. A sliding-bar graphic indicates how much epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), an antioxidant in tea, is contained in each bottle.

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Elsewhere, Insight Pharmaceuticals opted for an extended-text label in over-the-counter drugs as a matter of economics. The challenge: Wal-Mart reduced shelf space for Insight's Anacin Advanced Headache Formula brand. The retailer requested smaller packaging in several product categories. Insight needed to eliminate extraneous packaging and reduce the package "footprint" while also retaining required on-pack regulatory information.

The solution: Insight eliminated Anacin's chipboard cartons and introduced an on-bottle, extended-text label.

"We were fortunate to have a packaging engineer on staff," says Larry Freedman, Insight's Director of Business Innovation. "He knew that applying a wrapped label to a round bottle could be complicated, so we needed a good-quality product."

The split-based, pressure-sensitive labels, from WS Packaging Group, use a PLA-based lamination. The two-panel label features a pressure-sensitive "lift here" tab and a precurve top panel that enables the label to wrap around tight-diameter surfaces. The top panel wraps around the bottle. The base panel contains a die-cut in a portion of the label. On the bottle, that gap closes and enables the label to wrap around the bottle surface without being damaged.

A matte polypropylene over-laminate covers the silver metalized top panel to create a tactile feel and a matte image. The base panel contains a white, semi-gloss finish. Both panels are printed with UV- and water-based flexographic inks in 11 colors.

INTELLIGENCE ON DESIGN Consider facial coding for understanding consumer experiences By Dan Hill, President, Sensory Logic Inc.

Packaging is tangible, quite honestly, to such an extent that words can't readily follow. For example, the typical purchase "decision" takes merely 0.8 seconds at a grocery store. How much can any of us say in such a narrow time frame to explain a given choice? Not much; maybe a syllable or two will pass our lips.

Yet it's that extreme gap between intuitive shelf-set decision and how to cognitively and verbally account for consumer preferences that bedevils companies eager to sell more products.

Verbal input comes from the rational part of the brain. To make matters worse, we live in a post-literate culture in which it has been estimated that 20% of adults in the Western world are functionally illiterate. They are able to use words, but not well enough to really express themselves robustly. So research analysis via the medium of language—questions asked, and answers dutifully studied—is an insufficient approach to enhancing the in-store experience and, more specifically, the packaging because rationality isn't where the decision lives.

People feel in one-fifth the time it takes them to consciously think, and the subconscious sensory response is 99% of the game anyway, because only 25 to 40 of those 11 million bits of information that our senses are estimated to take in every second get consciously processed.

In other words, research that rests on the cognitive, Q-and-A level inhabits Lapland, while the sensory impressions that feed emotional responses are so numerous as to constitute China.

How to adjust to this relatively mind-blowing misdirection play that is standard research then becomes the business issue.

Fortunately, a pair of linked, noninvasive solutions already exists. Eye-tracking, whether done using a stationary machine with built-in cameras to pinpoint eye movement or soon to be in a mobile setup, provides a pathway to reading those 11 million bits of visual input data that humans gather naturally per second. The sequence, duration, and overall pattern of shoppers' gaze activity can be calculated down to one-twenty-fifth of a second to learn people's response to in-store displays and packaging, as depicted by the colored patches in the accompanying photo of the front panel of a cereal carton.

Yet, eye tracking alone isn't enough. Over the past 20 years, the use of brain scans has confirmed what we all know. We're primarily emotional decision-makers, making gut-level verdicts we then justify rationally to be defensively wise and socially acceptable. Verbal input still has a role to play in research. It helps us understand the justifications and thereby assists companies in providing consumers with the "intellectual alibi" that supplements decisions that will spur the truer, sensory-emotional connection with today's hurried, stressed, and generally option-saturated shoppers.

So, what's the noninvasive tool that can tap into the emotional response, a learning that's crucial because business goals like loyalty and recall are emotional rather than rational constructs? The answer is facial coding. What helps each of us can help companies, too, because the facial expressions by which we most reliably express our feelings are so universal that even a blind person does so in the same way. This occurs because emoting is innate and universal, rather than socialized. Moreover, the spontaneity essential to grasping and measuring consumers' fleeting in-store reactions is possible to gauge because the face is the only part of the body where the muscles attach to the skin.

Facial coding can be used to better understand the consumer experience. Read more about it.

To read the entire article, please click here.

STRATEGICALLY SPEAKING Shape is moving beyond a decorative whim By Jim George, Editor

If packaging is essential in marketing your brand, pay attention to shape as you attend trade shows and conferences this fall. Designers who focus on structural packaging form have long considered their craft something of a "dark art," compared with the perceived sexier world of colors and graphics, but that is evolving.

A consensus of experts who focus on package structure agree that more brand marketers are beginning to understand not only the importance of a package's shape in brand communication, but also how to use it effectively.

Stuart Leslie, President of 4sight Inc., is among them. "Bright colors will draw the consumer's eye to a package, but the shape and form tell the story of the brand," Leslie says. "Form helps them to discover the elements, the qualities of a product. They believe what they see with their own eyes."

Trust in the brand is critical as products proliferate across all categories. The importance of shape in brand communication was no more clearly expressed than in an engaging exercise at our Shelf Impact! Package Design Workshops, which recently concluded for 2008 in Salt Lake City, UT. SI Publisher Jim Chrzan and I handed each PDW attendee a worksheet bearing only the package, product, or logo silhouette of 12 brands—some are household names and others a little less well-known. We challenged our workshop participants to identify each brand.

To protect the embarrassed, I'll spare you the hilarious wild guesses that were made. Most important, eight or nine of the silhouettes were universally identified, and a couple others drew only a few incorrect answers. Notably, the scores were 100% for the ever-familiar Coca-Cola contoured bottle and Heinz's tapered ketchup bottle. Those two shapes are distinctive, but their value for their respective brands goes far beyond having statuesque curves and angles simply for appearance sake.

What the experts are saying, and what our workshop exercise reinforces, is that packaging teams are recognizing the idea of a distinctive shape as an investment that enhances brand value. If your brand is in "economizing" mode as a rough 2008 begins its fade into the sunset, you might want to re-examine the long-term impact that packaging form can bestow on your brand.

When you look at shape as one spoke in the wheel of an overall packaging efficiency effort, the reasons behind a decision to invest time and money in structural form become much clearer and justifiable. More about that in future issues of Shelf Impact!

I welcome your comments. Please call me at 630/897-7158 or contact me by e-mail.