Assessing the impact of packaging change

Packaging is often the most identifiable symbol of your brand. Presented with ever-increasing choice, consumers rely on their intuitive and unconscious response to packs to help them make quick purchase decisions that feel right. PackQuest is based on the latest thinking about consumer behaviour to answer three key questions:

• How well does your pack standout amongst the clutter?
• Does it differentiate your brand from the competition?
• Does it communicate the product truths?

At the early stages of development, PackQuest uses qualitative research to uncover your design equity, and to understand the cues at point of sale that drive purchasing.

Once potential designs have been developed, PackQuest provides quantitative evaluation of pack designs in a competitive context.

Understanding what cues drive purchasing at point of sale

Because so much of the process is intuitive and unconscious, consumers often find it difficult to explain how they make purchase decisions. So we use a combination of observation and intercept interviewing, in-store, to get to the heart of the decision-making process. We observe the behaviour and the emotions displayed by the shopper as they navigate the fixture. Intercept interviews allow us to follow up on particular behaviours and actions to learn more.

Understanding pack design equity

What makes your pack instantly recognisable? Are there deeply embedded cues of shape or colour that guide brand selection? Before making a change in pack design it is vital to understand your design equity, because you don’t want to jeopardise findability, or lose elements that support the core brand identity. PackQuest uses consumer elicitation and projective techniques to draw out a brand’s design equity.

Evaluating pack designs

Consumers can tell us what they like but they can’t always tell us why. The traditional ‘beauty contest’ approach, of comparing one pack design directly with another, falls into the trap of making the consumer an expert judge. PackQuest’s quantitative module never compares pack designs directly, but shows each design to a discrete (monadic) sample of consumers. By comparing response across these samples, we can infer which design is doing the best job for the brand.

Metaphorix™

Brand emotions are simple, unconscious impulses toward behaviour, and, therefore, questions about brands and packaging should encourage an intuitive, response. Our unique Metaphorix™ approach employs visual representations of primary metaphors to access consumers’ immediate emotional response to packaging – thus avoiding the over rationalisation inherent in traditional question formats and providing a more direct route into emotion.

PackQuest offers both face-to-face and online methods to help you answer these key questions:

How well does your pack stand out?
To measure standout, packs are presented in a competitive context in a shelf display. After timed exposures (either online or in central location) respondents are asked to record which brands they remember seeing, and in which position they saw it on-shelf (to avoid guessing).

Does it differentiate your brand?
Brand image dimensions are also asked in a competitive context to determine how strongly a new pack design differentiates your brand from the competition. This yields essential information about the effect of design change on perceptions of your brand, and also tells you much about the strength of competitive packaging. 

Does it communicate the product, and fit with the brand?
It is only at this final stage of the interview that we focus attention on the test packaging. We use spontaneous feedback to uncover feelings about the designs, and to check that they communicate essential product/brand information

If you would like to know more, please contact Sali Howells or David Penn on 020 8834 0900 or email conquest@conquestuk.com