Ask any marketer who works in FMCGs and they will take will tell you just how important product packaging is. It is our last opportunity to influence a shopper before they make a purchase. Consequently, marketers can tend to try and include too much information on the packaging. They want to emphasise every possible reason to buy all at once, which can overwhelm and confuse shoppers. Sometimes, less really is more.
Evidence to support this comes from a range of sources, including one slightly surprising one. The redesign of a court summon. At first glance you might think that the design of a court summons is going to be irrelevant. You would think that no matter how a summons is designed; you are going to read it carefully, ensuring you attend court on the right day and at the right time. However, in practice this is not the case. Of the 250,000 summons issued in New York, 100,000 people failed to turn up. Or to put it another way, 40% of people failed to turn up to court and were issued with an arrest warrant. Consequently, a team of behavioural scientists were brought in to see if they could understand what the issue was and redesign the form.
A brief look at the summons and the issues were obvious. For a start, it was not clear what the form was; simply having the title ‘Complaint/Information’. Even if they did read the form, it was confusing what you should do next. And if you had any questions, there was no obvious contact information. The redesigned sort to address all these issues. The form had a clear and explicit title - Criminal Court Appearance Ticket. It provided step by step instructions on what you needed to do, and in which order. And if you still had questions, there was a clear contact information.
These changes may sound small, but the implications were significant. After switching to the new design, the failure to appear dropped from 47% to 40.8%, a relative reduction of 13%i. This may not sound like a huge change, but in practice this meant that 30,000 fewer arrest warrants were issued, saving the city $140,000.
So what can we learn when it comes to packaging design? Marketers spend a huge amount of time fretting over little details. We are so involved with our design, and we assume are customers are as well. But this is not the case. In the aisle, customers spend very little time looking at individual products. For example, when it comes to buying laundry detergent, the median time it took shoppers to make a purchase was only 8.5 secondsii – and this includes the time it takes to walk down the aisle. And the situation is not much better for other categories such as coffee, toothpaste, margarine, and cereal. In these categories, the average shopping time was less than 12 seconds, and 42% of shoppers spent five seconds or lessiii.
If customers cannot find what they are looking for in 8-10 seconds, they generally walk away without making a purchaseiv. But it is not just a simple case of finding the product you are after, but it can be amount finding information about the product. If you are buying a healthy breakfast cereal, you will want to know if it is healthy. Maybe, how many calories or how much sugar is in a typical bowl? The process needs to be as easy as possible. It does not matter if the information is on the packaging, the customer needs to be able to spot it quickly and easily – just like with the court summons.
If you don’t believe us, we have numerous eye tracking examples where a customer has stopped, looked at a product and moved on. When we’ve asked them why they did not purchase the product, they explain that they did not know if it did XXX. However, it clearly stated this on the packaging, but it just didn’t stand out enough from the clutter. Brands may test how their packaging perform, but unless you test it under realistic supermarket conditions, where people are distracted, and only half paying attention to the category, only then will you start to understand how it will perform.
References
i Fishbane, A., Ouss, A., & Shah, A. K. (2020). Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court.Science,370(6517), eabb6591.
ii Hoyer, Wayne D. (1984), “An Examination of Consumer Decision Making for a Common Repeat Purchase Product,” Journal of Consumer Research, 11 (December), 822-829.
iii Dickson, Peter R. and Alan G. Sawyer (1990), “The Price Knowledge and Search of Supermarket Shoppers,” Journal of Marketing, 54 (July), 42-54.
iv Young, Scott H. (2010), Winning At Retail: Insights from 35 Years of Packaging & Shopper Research. Skokie, Illinois: In-Store Marketing Institute.