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Opening eyes to eye tracking

Eye tracking is a behavioral research approach that may be poised to become a standard practice in guiding package design. CPG companies can leverage it to assess shopper behavior and validate ideas.

SUCCESS FOR PANTENE. In Western Europe, eye tracking confirmed P&G's belief that creating blue blocking would improve visibility
SUCCESS FOR PANTENE. In Western Europe, eye tracking confirmed P&G's belief that creating blue blocking would improve visibility

You likely would base your pitch substantially on some form of research that relied either on shoppers’ claims of liking the package or their stated purchase intent. But these measures are limited, because shelf presence matters most when gauging potential performance in the store. They also don’t address critical questions such as what did shoppers see? For how long?

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are becoming convinced that traditional consumer research techniques won’t answer those questions. With millions of dollars hanging in the balance on the success or failure of a new product or a package redesign, they want to leave no doubt that their package will have the stopping power that gets shoppers to select their product. The path to success is discovering what appeals to shoppers, even if they can’t articulate why.

One area where CPG companies are finding those go versus no-go answers is through eye-tracking research. Eye tracking got its start decades ago in military and medical applications, and in recent years has gradually crossed over into consumer behavior as well. Today, some CPG companies find eye-tracking research invaluable in guiding package design, and it seems poised to become a standard practice among product manufacturers of all sizes.

Christian Simms is among those who are acutely aware of eye tracking and works intimately with it at Procter & Gamble. Simms is associate director of consumer market knowledge for P&G’s Pantene and Herbal Essences brands, and he urges CPG companies to give eye tracking a serious look.

“What consumers say and what they react to is a very different thing than what they spontaneously react to,” Simms says of eye tracking’s benefits. “We’re interested in what they can tell us without saying it to us.”

Pamela Waldron at Johnson & Johnson agrees. “The potential loss of sales to a business by diluting their equity and getting lost on shelf is enormous, and it’s not a risk one wants to take in this day and age,” says Waldron, global director, Oral Care, in J&J’s Global Strategic Insights Group.

To which Scott Young, president at Perception Research Services (PRS), adds, “Eye-tracking gives you the only valid way of measuring shelf visibility, because it’s fully a behavioral measure. If you ask consumers attitudinally what they saw on shelf, you’re not going to get accurate information, because recall is biased by brand familiarity. If a shopper sees a soda shelf, she will ‘remember’ seeing Coke and Pepsi, even if they weren’t actually on the shelf.”

Outside assistance
A few CPG companies conduct eye-tracking operations in-house, but most of the time, they approach market research companies such as PRS to do it for them. PRS typically uses eye tracking as one part of a larger study to pretest new packages before they are introduced to the market. The eye-tracking component measures a package’s shelf visibility and gauges how a package is first viewed.

When measuring shelf visibility, the goal of eye tracking is to gauge a package’s ability to break through clutter and be considered in those first critical seconds as shoppers’ eyes scan store shelves, Young says. “The validation work we’ve done proves that increasing shelf visibility is the single biggest driver of sales gains, and that low shelf visibility is a major reason why many new products fail in market,” he adds.

At PRS, individual consumers view a series of store scenes in which store shelves are presented at 6 feet wide via LCD projection. Consumers view the categories as if they were shopping, and using a joystick, they click to move from one category to another. Eye tracking, meanwhile, records their fixations, or notations, at 60 readings per second.

After the readings are recorded, the resulting data produces a heat map of the fixation readings. Colors are more intense in areas that drew more viewing fixations. The data also is reported in terms of the percentage of shoppers who actively fixated on each brand or product on shelf.

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