The silent temptation--packaging

When you walk into a typical American supermarket and do a 30-minute shopping, you will be attracted by more than 30,000 items. In the end, there will be many kinds of commodities that make you think they are worth buying. why? Packing - yes, it is this silent but persuasive salesman who tempted you.

Every box, every bottle, every jar, every bag, and every spray bottle have been carefully designed to deeply impress your heart. Are you a good father? Do you care about environmental issues? 7 Do you always care about the small and beautiful things in your life? Every detail has been carefully considered, modified and tested on the shelves of the mall. Modifications to package designs are often accurate to the order of magnitude, because designers don't just think of them as a package or a label. What you buy is a personality, an attitude, or even a belief.

One of the pioneers who studied how people reacted to packaging was Lewis Chriskin, an expert in marketing psychologists who began research on packaging from the thirties. He put the same product in two kinds of packages, one with many rings and the other with many triangles, and then he asked which products the people being tested liked and why. As a result, 80% of people opted for products in circular boxes that they believe are better.

Cheskin later wrote: "After asking the first 200 testees, I could hardly believe the test results; but when asked about 19O0 individuals, I had to admit that most people have turned the feeling of packaging into The feeling of its content." In addition he also has an amazing discovery: Even after trying these same products, people still like to wrap the ring-shaped pattern.

Cheskin repeated this test for many different types of products. He found that the appearance of the package is very powerful for people. For example, it can make people think that the taste of cookies is particularly good and the detergency of soap is particularly strong.

Cheskin called this phenomenon "transfer of feelings." This not only became the basis of his career—he later became an advisor to P&G, Standard OiI, and McDonald's—but it also pioneered packaging research. Although consumers are still maturing, the concepts that Chesking initially defined still work. Experiments with tasting beer with eyes closed can be repeated over and over, with a view to judging the taste and quality of a certain beer through a large number of investigations. When beer bottles appeared, beer packages immediately changed the way people tasted beer.

One of Chesking’s most dramatic experiments was to send three kinds of armpit deodorants packaged in different color patterns to a group of testees and tell them that the deodorants used three formulas to allow them to judge Screening. The result is that Pattern B is considered good; Pattern c is considered too aggressive and not effective; Pattern A is considered simply terrible. A few of them were tested using model A and had skin allergies and had to see a doctor. However, in fact these three deodorants are the same product. The following expert, Water Stern, pointed out: "Consumers generally cannot differentiate between products and their packaging. Many products are packaging - or many packages are products."

One of San Francisco’s leading packaging companies, Primo Angeli, used this rule to earn the extreme: to design packaging for products that have not yet emerged, and the future products after these packaging have subsequently passed market testing and eventually established them. Market position. Only when a company is convinced that it has a product that has won the market will it develop the real product. Products launched in this way include Just Dessert brand condiments and Nestle's upcoming product.

Color is one of the most important tools for packaging. By studying the response of human eyeballs to packaging, it has been found that color is one of the fastest factors that trigger eye movement among packaging factors.

Let us give an example of U.S. V8 vegetable juice. For decades, the overall composition on the V8 label has remained almost the same: a group of horizontally placed tomatoes surrounded by green leafy vegetables and vertical celery and carrots that you may not notice but can feel The color of the vegetables is strong. The V8's label is not printed according to the standard four-color printing technology of printing magazines, but is printed in five colors. This gives the label a surprisingly vivid color, so this vegetable juice is particularly attractive to customers. The power of packaging may also depend on balancing a set of contradictions—that is, finding power points between offensive and soft conflict. Offensive is to make the product attractive in the store, and when it is taken home it will appear soft again.

Triangles and other patterns with prominent sharp corners are eye-catching. But as Chester's early experiments confirmed, people will look at them with an unfriendly eye. This also happens with color. Chris King thinks the most striking color is yellow, but it has negative meaning for some products. When you visit the store, you will notice that there are many sharp and explosive patterns on some packages, usually bright yellow. These patterns are very eye-catching, but the words written on them are often very friendly: "new and improved", "price cuts 20%" or "free gift." Circular or oval patterns give people a complete, acceptable and tolerant feeling. They are the basic patterns of many packaging, because such patterns can make people have a positive association. But in order to design the effect, they must also be combined with other symbols. Therefore, the concentric circles on the Tide wash bag are covered with thick "Tide" characters.

Cheskin once studied with the fast food giant McDonald to whether he would abandon his “M” type building sign. His research shows that "M" is a huge wealth of McDonald's, because it has a tremendous spiritual effect on people's subconscious. Chriskin also described "M" as "the breast of McDonald's." This is a powerful thinking connection when you want to give up cooking at home.

There is no doubt that people have an instinctive response to color and shape. But how these factors have motivated people to decide to buy a pound of bacon or a bottle of moisturizer, but not everyone can understand it. This process is certainly not rational. Stan Gross, a marketing expert at Harvard, points out: "I can't ask why you like a package. You can't tell it. The package is not silent. It is shouting - but it is in your heart. Shouted."

In order to explore this inner activity, Gross has made many people tested—sometimes consumers and sometimes packaging designers—play games that reveal people’s inner activities. He organized the testees into groups and gave them various types of packaging. He told them the story of the packaging: "If this kind of toothpaste is a person, please write down its obituary." Or: "If This kind of detergent is a movie, so what is its content?” He encouraged people to do these interesting games; because he thought it could reveal people’s reasoning and more real responses. A group of testees who tested Tide laundry detergent said that Tide was the American action movie superstar Sylvester Stallone. Gros pointed out: “The positive aspect of this description is that this product can wash your clothes and it has strong cleansing power; on the negative side, this product seems a bit stupid.” Another group of testees saw another brand of detergent that people are familiar with as a lazy woman who was only 14 years old. She was pregnant when she was 17 years old. She wore a loincloth and she didn’t wear it. Go to Halloween party. Gross's explanation is: "This product is very 'pleasing.' It has many characteristics for many people - because these people are mostly lazy.