Imagine being able to measure customers’
visual attention to - and experience with
- packaging design by the study of visual
reaction. Think about the benefits of testing
packaging before production to ensure
you get the wanted result in order to catch the
consumers’ eye in the store.
The future of food packaging, says Swedish eye
tracking company Tobii, lies in ensuring your
product is eye-catching enough to arrest the
attention of shoppers who make the majority
of their decisions instore. “Getting that wrong,”
Tobii Pro Insight researcher Ali Farokhian says,
“can be quite expensive – both in the form of
direct costs when you have to redo designs
and material, and of course in the form of lost
revenues.”
Tobii focuses on studying visual attention to
help businesses understand human behaviour
in situations such as how consumers perceive
packaging. “Consumers,” Farokhian says,
“often function on autopilot, so the key issue is
how to arrive at a design that captures attention
and interest in a relevant way, persuading the
consumer to dare to try something new. In the
hunt for optimal solution, what we offer is a
powerful tool.”
An eye tracker is a sophisticated device attached
to a screen or integrated into a pair of
glasses that tracks and records where people
look and how they move their gaze. With software
you can analyse, visualise and interpret
this information in multiple ways.
These insights help marketers to effectively
design communication to catch the shopper's
eye. Eye tracking lets you see how consumers
react to different marketing messages and
understand their cognitive engagement in real
time. It minimises recall errors and the social
desirability effect while revealing information
conventional research methods normally miss.
“By knowing what a person looks at, we can
better understand that person’s behaviour, or
evaluate the performance of images, products,
web pages, environments or any other visual
object,” Farokhian says. “These insights are
extremely useful in many fields. Just think
about what question could you answer, and
which insights you could get, if only you
knew where people were looking.”
The company points to the example of Iggesund
Paperboard, the maker of high-quality paperboards
Invercote and Incada. The products
are the two strongest brands on the European
market, and Tobii Pro Insight is Iggesund’s project
partner. The latter works actively to convey
knowledge about how to get the most out of its
products, spreading knowledge about packaging
and the various materials available.
“We want to make our customers aware of
the possibilities that are available to them at
an early stage so they can evaluate various
design alternatives,” business development
director Jonas Adler says. “Combining measurements
of visual impressions with sensory
measurements of packaging’s haptics – how it
is experienced when it is held by someone – is
ingenious.
“The psychological concept called ‘the endowment
effect’ – that we have difficulty getting
rid of things we own – can also be applied to
something we are holding in our hand. The
more pleasant that experience is, the longer we
want to keep on holding it.
“We often hear from customers that one reason
they choose Invercote is the experience when
they hold a piece of packaging in their hand,”
Adler says. “We really welcome the opportunities
to measure this, because until now the
feedback has mostly been word of mouth. Now
we can actually measure the haptic differences
between materials.”
South Carolina-based Clemson University
offers a highly-ranked educational programme
in packaging expertise. The university has built
a laboratory equipped with eye tracking tools
from Tobii Pro and designed to be an environment
where types of packaging can be tested.
“The use of eye tracking will result in design
that is more consumer oriented,” Associate
Professor Andrew Hurley says. “By that I mean
packaging that makes it easier for consumers
to find the right product faster and enables us
to more rapidly and more efficiently find the
products that satisfy our needs.”
MACHO
MAN
‘Masculine’ plant-powered
vegan food is set to be one
of the biggest food trends
of 2019, according to a
Dutch food design agency.
Traditionally, men eat meat,
the Marielle Bordewijk agency
says, but some fear ‘social
shame’ when ordering
vegetarian or vegan dishes.
“What we have discovered is
that many men are interested
in eating less meat, they
just need social permission
to do so,” University of
Southampton researcher Dr
Emma Roe says. However,
2019 could see a shift in this
behaviour, the agency says,
thanks to vegan role models
who are leading by example
– such as Derek Sarno of
Wicked Healthy. The chef,
along with his brother Chad,
has created innovative recipes
such as BBQ Butternut Mac
and Gunpowder Potato
Chana Masala, and since the
range’s January launch with
supermarket chain Tesco, four
million have been sold. “We’ve
proven to the world it’s time
for a change and people are
responding,” Sarno says.
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