A Behavioral Approach to Measuring Pack Effectiveness

What are the critical metrics that drive shopper choice?

by Jason Bradbury
Vice President, Client Development at Behaviorally

Recent studies on consumer behavior have found that shoppers typically spend less than one minute making purchase decisions and that very few engage in any sort of comparison-shopping behavior. This alone highlights the importance of designing packaging such that it performs optimally at this ‘first moment of truth’ to promote in-market success. Shoppers are making decisions quickly, and in many cases, the shopper journey is on ‘auto-pilot’, and absent a rationalized decision-making process. This dynamic in shopper decision-making highlights two critical realities:

1. Research methods for assessing packaging performance must reflect the dynamics of how shoppers actually engage with products or categories in-context (either in a brick-and-mortar shelf set or e-commerce results page).
2. Assessments of packaging performance must prioritize "observed" shopper behavioral impact over claimed "rational" measures – as what shoppers "say" and what they "do" often does not align.

What then become the critical metrics by which we should measure the shelf agnostic performance of packaging? Those that assess behavioral impact, of course!

We believe that there are simple yet powerful factors that are the greatest predictors of packaging design driving shopper choice to the advantage of your product:

1. Visibility (Did the consumer see it?)
2. Findability (Could they accurately locate it on the digital or physical shelf?)
3. Communication (Did the consumer understand your product’s benefits at a visceral level?)
4. Purchase (Did the consumer put it in their cart?)

We apply our unique behavioral framework to dig into the degree to which the pack is conveying compelling benefits that make a purchase choice easy and eliminates barriers that would introduce friction and de-rail selection or your product.

Visibility comes first

Research has consistently shown that shelf visibility is perhaps the single most important foundational performance predictor of a package’s success in impacting sales. It simply goes without saying that if a brand or product does not break through on shelf or get noticed, it will have zero chance of making it into a shopper’s cart for purchase. In reality, a package may be highly compelling with the most motivating benefit claims, however, if shoppers never see it in on shelf, they will simply pass it by.