PACKAGING IS KEY TO BUILDING A LASTING RELATIONSHIP WITH CUSTOMERS P27 WILL COLOUR PSYCHOLOGY AND P33 - P37NEUROMARKETING REVITALIZE YOUR BRAND?

Bringing back memories

Packaging that offers added-value convenience shows you understand the shopper’s daily challenges and can make life a little easier. The Harris Poll on packaging found many consumers are willing to pay more for packages that are easier to open, store, or carry. Nostalgia is a very influential emotion. How can your packaging bring up positive memories with shoppers? Can you make them feel like a kid again, remind them of spending the holidays with their grandparents, or take them back to their college days? Nostalgia marketing seems to work particularly well with Millennials, now the largest consumer group in the U.S.

Finding common ground

Finding common ground can also include communicating shared values. Are natural or organic ingredients important to your ideal shopper? What about sustainability? Nielsen found 66 percent of global consumers are willing to pay a premium price for products from companies committed to positive social and environmental impact. The marketing messages you print on your packaging, and the materials you choose, say something about your brand values. Online dating and online shopping have a lot in common. In some ways, they’ve made it easier for single people to meet and brands to connect with consumers. Yet, it’s also created some complications. Talk to anyone who’s tried online dating, and they’ll express their frustration with seeing one thing on a date’s profile and finding another when they meet in person. Online shoppers have similar experiences with e-commerce packaging. You need a different strategy for e-commerce than you do for traditional retail settings. Brands should certainly consider the online shopping experience and use packaging that stands out on a category page full of products in the same way as on a crowded shelf. However, what happens after they click add-to-cart and check out matters, too. That’s why e-commerce giant Amazon is encouraging what’s been dubbed “frustration free packaging.”

Online shoppers don’t want to open a cardboard box that’s far too large for the merchandise only to be annoyed by more packaging that’s difficult to open or which failed to protect the merchandise during shipping or the e-commerce supply chain. Is your brand following best practices for e-commerce packaging?

Creating a love that lasts

At some point in the relationship, it becomes exclusive. Whether it’s conscious or unspoken, a decision is made not to see other people, and you remain loyal to the one you love. CPG brands can use retail displays and packaging to keep shoppers coming back and dissuade them from straying to competitors. Part of this challenge involves keeping your brand top of mind. Connecting your merchandising strategy to your paid advertising closes the loop and reinforces your marketing messages. Good advertising generates an emotion in the audience. But, in most cases, they won’t immediately purchase the product. A cohesive strategy helps shoppers remember what they saw or heard in your ads and on your packaging. Such a strategy causes them to relive the emotions created through your campaigns. That means you’ll capitalize on the investment your brand makes in paid promotions. What you don’t want is your relationship with shoppers growing stale. Couples who’ve been together for a long time are always looking for ways to keep things interesting. You can do the same with retail merchandising solutions. Find the right balance between consistency and fresh ideas so that shoppers stay interested while you avoid the possibility of diluting your brand at the same time.

Emotions are powerful

Humans are emotional beings who like to think we are rational. However, the truth is, we only use logic to justify our emotional purchasing decisions. You need to win hearts in order to win minds. That requires developing a merchandising strategy that produces a unique experience in the store and after the package comes home. Displays and packaging design are effective ways to show some love for both the retailer and the shopper. You’ll help shoppers find products they want and help retailers boost sales. It’s a winning love triangle for everyone involved.

Product Intelligence

In our increasingly competitive world, tailoring your products, marketing, and innovation to shifting consumer behaviours is critical to keep your customers coming back. As such, social listening is one of the most powerful tools your brand can use to tweak your products and increase sales. At the end of the day, you want your products to fly off the shelves, and that’s where product intelligence comes in. It informs how consumers perceive your existing products as well as emerging trends and attributes that customers are adopting. Even if your products are performing well, there’s always a little more you can do to get better mileage from your product line. There are many factors that product intelligence can inform. Here are a few statistics in areas that can be used to build better product performance:  Packaging plays a critical role in how your products are received. 85% of consumers say colour is their primary reason for buying a particular product over another. 80% believe colour makes a brand more recognizable.  Social listening is a must for product intelligence. 54.58% of the Indian population uses social media and spends two hours on various channels, often discovering and talking about brands and products.  Consumers are increasingly eco-conscious, and product intelligence helps brands build and maintain cultural connections. For example, 45% of Gen Zers prioritize sustainability over cost – which could be an angle your product messaging takes to increase purchase intent.

What is Product Intelligence?

Quite simply, product intelligence captures the voice of the customer using social listening and media analytics to develop impactful consumer experiences around your products. It informs your existing product reception to discover what people love and dislike about your product. Additionally, product intelligence explores emerging trends and shifting consumer behaviour to inform innovation. Product intelligence tells you who is using your product so you can dig into your audience’s behaviours, attributes, and emotions. This intel can inform necessary marketing adjustments, packaging upgrades, or additions to your product line. Since consumer behaviours are built on perceptions that never stay static, it’s essential that your product intelligence stays up to date on emerging trends.

As opinions shift, it’s necessary to move with the times. As such, product intelligence built on social listening will let you know why sales are lagging on a once strong performing product. That way, you can make changes that meet your consumers where they are now. In a nutshell, product intelligence gathers Intel about your products and mines general consumer opinions and emerging trends to inform innovation. Consumer opinion is a moving target, and your product performance hinges on staying relevant.

Will Colour Psychology and Neuromarketing Revitalize Your Brand?

Probably not. When you go to the grocery store, do you ever stop to look at packaging and branding? The idea that colours like red or blue evoke different feelings popped up whenever I researched logos or branding. While I do tend to purchase items if they come in my favourite colour, purple, I was skeptical that colours evoked specific reactions in consumers. After years of higher education studying neuroscience, I was pessimistic but nonetheless open to using neuroscience where possible. According to infographics, neuromarketing companies and articles, different colours describe the characteristics of a brand. The light blue packaging on a bar of soap might associate with the quality of calmness. The Red Bull logo has two right red bulls in the center, which we associate with excitement. My heart is practically racing, thinking about the packaging. But it does give me a bit of pause. I mean, can something as simple as coloration strongly influence our psychological and cognitive functioning? In recent years, many scientific ideas were misinterpreted and promptly incorporated in technology and Silicon Valley companies. Take, for example, the idea of dopamine fasting. By perpetuating multiple neuromyths, practitioners believe that they recharge by starving the brain of dopamine and reward. Not only may this be maladaptive, but it might not even affect dopamine levels in the brain. Anyways, I decided to fall down the rabbit hole of colour psychology to see if the ideas are empirically supported by actual research. First, I wanted to learn

about the context and methods of colour psychology to understand whether its applications in ‘neuromarketing’ are warranted.

A Brief History of Colour Psychology

One of the first mentions of colour psychology emerged in 1810, in Theory of Colours, written by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Informed by his experiences with art, he speculated that colours influenced emotional experiences. Thus, he used a dichotomy to describe the emotional valence of different colours. Pluscolours which conferred positive feelings (i.e. red, red-yellow). Minus-colours, which conferred anxious or sad feelings (i.e. the blues). In the mid-to-late 1900s, several psychologists proposed other hypotheses, congruent with the state of knowledge at the time. In the 1940s, Psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein looked to associate the perception of different colors with emotion in some of his patients. This inspired other researchers to propose that the wavelength was associated with the calming or stimulating effect of a perceived colour. While the proposed work was fascinating, certain aspects of colour perception weren’t controlled. The colour that we perceive has three further parameters: hue, lightness, saturation. Hue is directly related to the wavelength of light that we perceive. The same wavelength of light may be present at different levels of lightness/brightness. In dim lighting, the same wavelength may appear different. Meanwhile,

saturation tells us how much grey is present within a specific colour. A saturated colour appears a lot more lively and energetic. As the 2000s emerged, brain imaging technology became more available and effective. Also, improvements in methodology and experimental-design made this phenomenon easier to study and decipher.

Colour Psychology, Branding and Neuromarketing

Colour psychology is taken as a certainty when it comes to branding. While there are other studies conducted on individual or sports performance, showing associations between colours and success — it was contextdependent. Methodological issues on saturation, brightness or hue aren’t mentioned in online discussions or articles. I looked at a few recent studies to see what they tell us. I didn’t find a lot of large, well-designed studies. A lot of these studies associate certain aspects of brain imaging with response to packaging or branding or colour. Some studies don’t explain their methods or statistical analysis very well and some conflate correlation and causation. There were only four publications that popped up when I searched ‘neuromarketing’ and ‘colour’ (as well as associated keywords) in the PubMed search engine of peerreviewed papers. Nonetheless, I pulled out a few interesting studies.

Study #1: Store illumination and shopper response

An interesting 2016 study looked specifically at store lighting. In essence, this would control the brightness aspect of colour. They used an electroencephalogram (EEG), which recorded measurements of brain waves. EEGs provide researchers with a neurophysiological readout or response reflecting ongoing processes in large regions of the brain. When comparing the emotional response of specific colours, some colours evoked a larger difference in neurophysiological response. When illuminating oranges or apples with a purple light, the physiological reactions were stronger than with red or yellow. They speculated it had too with the contrast between the colours, drawing more attention to the fruit. While the research revealed some effect of colour, it was context-dependent.

Study #2: Blue lighting and post-stress relaxation

A small study of 12 people found that they de-stressed faster after exposure to blue light rather than white light. The participant stress level was measured using a standard questioner as well as EEG readouts. The study used a small sample of participants. Its unclear what this might mean in branding conditions.

Study #3: Neurophysiological Responses to Packaging

In another fascinating study, researchers set out to determine whether different aspects of packaging (colour, text or images) influenced participants. They had 63 different combinations of colour, text and images, to show to their 40 participants. Along with self-reported measures, they also used eye-tracking technology and measured brain waves with EEG to determine attention and arousal. This study hoped to predict whether or not participants liked a product based solely on this information. Interestingly, they found that a background colour added to the packaging increased the dislike of a product. However, the only background colour they used in their study was orange. While they had enough information to predict whether individuals liked or disliked a product, it was still limited to this binary classification. They did see activity in regions of the brain involved in colour processing and decision-making as expected. The authors do note that more research needs to be conducted to understand the process of neuromarketing.

Is Color Psychology or Neuromarketing Real and Effective?

Through my literature search, I haven’t found any compelling studies that support the idea of neuromarketing or specific colours to evoke emotion or perception. Like dopamine fasting, this may be a trend that takes some plausible psychology and overgeneralizes or misinterprets it. While showing that there are EEG or brain-imaging correlates towards our decisions or perceptions, the evidence cannot yet support the use of colour psychology in branding. While purchasing a hobby EEG headset has never been cheaper, designing a good experiment and test a hypothesis is challenging.

While colour may play a cultural and context-dependent role in our perception, it’s still unclear if this influences consumers and their perception of your brand. The applications of colour psychology and neuromarketing have been greatly exaggerated. I don’t know where all of the information about colour and brand perception originated. Nonetheless when I design logos, I can rest assured that my colour choices likely won’t control any minds.

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