Touch me. Feel me. Buy me.

While packaging has to be visually enticing to be noticed, it also has to appeal to the other senses as well if it is going to make the brand stand out from a sea of choices.

In the shape of a cannon ball, Captain Morgan’s Cannon Blast packaging prompts consumers to stop, touch, and buy.
In the shape of a cannon ball, Captain Morgan’s Cannon Blast packaging prompts consumers to stop, touch, and buy.

Touch is crucial to all of us as human beings. When we are visually engaged by something, we reach out and touch it. While we are visual by nature, we are bombarded by product imagery more than ever, suggesting that a richer, multi-dimensional experience with brands is required. The stakes in the brand packaging game are rising.

Marketers are looking at package design and coming to terms with a simple truth: People are multisensory, so why shouldn’t packaging be? While packaging has to be visually enticing to be noticed, it also has to appeal to the other senses as well if it is going to make the brand stand out from a sea of choices in category after category. Even with inventiveness and a disruptive mindset on the part of intrepid marketers, it’s getting increasingly challenging to find a unique manner in which to leverage visual and verbal brand communication alone to competitive advantage. Packaging has to evolve so that it can invite touch.

With advances in digital printing capabilities and the development of new substrates, more is possible than ever before. Consumers are attracted by and respond to packaging color, shape, scent, tactile feel, and sound—real or suggested—by the elements of package design. Based on his research, branding guru Martin Lindstrom observed in his best-selling book “BrandSense,” that branding has always been about establishing emotional ties between the brand and the consumer. “As in any relationship, emotions are based on information gathered from the senses,” he says. “In order to achieve emotional engagement, the sensory appeal of a brand has to have two essential ingredients: It must be unique to your brand, and it must become habitual.”

The more senses we can leverage through package design, the more compelling the brand will be to consumers. By understanding its role as a primary influencer as well as its power of persuasiveness in creating engagement directly leading to sales, elevated package design should become a greater focus for marketers. Packaging should be leveraged to enhance the consumer experience and differentiate and distance it from competing brands, and it should be tapped to play a key role in beginning relationships that bond consumers to brands.

The consumer response process

Creating inspiring, brand-centric stimuli for consumers is crucial in making initial contact. When they are attracted by specific packaging, consumers are experiencing a sensory interaction. More importantly, they have tuned out every other choice. Sensations are created via some or all of the consumer’s sensory receptors—eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or fingers. The more senses that are engaged, the more emotive the experience. Perception is the manner in which raw sensations are then interpreted and added to in the consumer’s mind to attach meaning. This must be understood: Consumers process a small amount of information from the stimuli with which they are bombarded and attach meaning to an even smaller amount, which is then stored in their brains.

So the right kind of stimuli makes the brand desirable and memorable. They elicit emotions and stir up personal associations and memories for consumers in the form of past, enjoyed experiences with the brand and even shared experiences with friends. We know that brand success hinges on how people feel rather than their rational thought processes and that these emotions are deep-seated and often subliminal. And we know that consumers are increasingly interested in seeking out satisfying experiences rather than in acquiring things.

Since the 1980s, researchers have increasingly studied what is referred to as hedonic consumption. This is defined as the multisensory, fantasy, and emotional aspects of consumers’ interactions with products. A branded product is used to fulfill fantasies and satisfy emotions. But brands aren’t purchased without consumers first interacting with—and being sold by—packaging.

When prompted to touch and then to pick up packaging, the “buy process” has actually begun. This has been confirmed by business school professors and researchers, Joann Peck and Suzanne Shu. In their research, “The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership,” they say, “The research finds that merely touching an object results in an increase in perceived ownership of that object. For non-owners, or buyers, perceived ownership can be increased with either mere touch or with imagery encouraging touch.” Therefore we can conclude that tactile packaging adds more value—even if it increases cost—because it shapes perception and creates a deeper level of engagement, prompting touch that leads to sales.

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