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Effective package design is built on more than meets the eye

I was in the grocery store doing my weekly shopping. My first stop: body wash. I stood in front of a sea of options when one caught my eye. I glanced at the price.

Who among us has not had this shopping experience, where we’re confronted with what seems like an avalanche of products? Eventually, all senses become engaged, and the subconscious tracks and registers the total “product” encounter, helping us make a purchase decision and, most likely, laying the foundation for a repurchase decision.

Package and product researchers and designers need to work in unison to deliver products that make purchase and repurchase easy for the consumer. The PTIS Product Formula© (see above) suggests that many factors are closely linked in the consumer’s unconscious or subconscious when a product is purchased. If there are disconnects among any of these factors, or senses, the consumer will challenge and often reject the product.

Consumer senses and the way they interact have been largely underleveraged in package and merchandising design. Vision happens when an image passes through our eyes to our brain and is critical to the decisions we make; it is often the first sense engaged in creating perceptions and expectations. But sound and smell are important, too, as they link directly to memory and emotions. The great “sensation transference” work of the late Louis Cheskin demonstrated that package design can even affect our perception of product flavor, yet typical sensory work is performed without packaging. Sound connects with deep memories—memorable music and audible package cues will connect to positive or negative past experiences. Touch relates to sensing temperature, pleasure, pain, and pressure—and the ability of our largest organ (our skin) to deliver positive or negative messages to be stored in the brain.

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