The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (32 page)

In the midst of the modern neighborhood grocery store, it is still the world’s perfect hunting machine. And hunt it does, avidly, continuously, and relentlessly.

You are blissfully unaware of that fact as you stroll the aisles—your prefrontal cortex ensures that you devote conscious resources to cognitive puzzle solving and price comparing and choosing between the regular Oreos and the Double-Stufs. But all the while, the hunter deep below the surface is scanning.

What is it looking for?
The answer for starters is the familiar. For male minds especially,
landmarks in the immediate environment
are a critical component of the shopping experience. For females,
the overall context
matters more.
Both facts are reasons why effective packaging is not only at the core of successful product marketing in the retail setting, but is also one of the single most important elements of neuromarketing.

Others have opined about how the package is the face of the brand, theo-rized about the proper proportions and relationships of fonts and logos, pondered the appeal of economy-size versus standard-size, labored over shapes, and on and on. All are valid and certainly worthwhile and necessary. But to fully grasp how consumers really respond to packaging, we must dive deeper, to the place where data about your package design arrives and is examined, dissected, analyzed, and judged.

The Subconscious

Last night I was at the grocery store, and I caught myself scanning the shelves along the chips and dips aisle. I suddenly realized (this is the penalty of being so fully immersed in neuromarketing) that I was actively searching, and I thought about what my brain was actually doing right at that moment. Your brain, and every other consumer’s, does exactly the same thing.

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We seek the familiar, pleasing, and reassuring. We seek the connection that we have had before, because we anticipate the rewards that we know that connection will bring.

But . . .

The brain also values and seeks the new.

In addition to the search for what’s familiar,
our brains are also drawn
to Novelty.
Because of evolutionary forces that drove developments in brain structure and function, we have learned—through a whole lot of trial and error, a good deal of which involved life and death—to search out new experiences, because ultimately they can be rewarding to both our physical and our psychological selves.

When you look at the sheer number of brands, products, and packages just along one aisle of your average supermarket, or wall-to-wall at Wal-mart, it begs the question (a critical one for every marketer): Does my package stand out against the clutter and especially the competition? If it does, why does it? Could I make it work even better? And—forbid the thought—if it doesn’t, what do I do about it?

Finally, thanks to neuroscience, we have the answers to those questions.

Packaging Effectiveness Framework

In analyzing neurological responses to packaging across a variety of retail environments across multiple categories, we found a number of common threads.

Based on these neuroscientific observations we created a Packaging Effectiveness Framework (PEF) that allows us to evaluate, from a neuroscientific standpoint, the key elements that make a package stand out and optimally represent the product within.

This also helps answer the three vexing questions that confront every marketer:

1.
Does my
product pop out on the shelf ?
This determination is made using the NeuroMetrics of Overall Effectiveness and Novelty.

2.
Will she select my product and take it home? This determination is made using the NeuroMetrics Purchase Intent and Awareness/Understanding.

3.
When the product is in the pantry, will she use it? How soon? This determination is made using the NeuroMetrics of Immediacy of Consumption and Novelty.

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The Buying Brain

The difficulty for marketers is that if you ask a consumer “what makes a package really pop out?,” he or she will be hard-pressed to recall, much less articulate, all of the packaging components that had an impact on them.

The Packaging Effectiveness Framework incorporates the best practices we use in evaluating any given package and its pop-out potential. The individual elements of the PEF are:

Imagery and Iconography:
Our studies have consistently confirmed that choice of imagery and iconography are key drivers that impact the pop-out power of a package at the subconscious level. The primary NeuroMetrics we track to evaluate imagery and iconography are Attention, Emotion, Memory, and Novelty. In the store, imagery and iconography need to create a tremendous amount of emotional appeal. While attention is important, the amount of emotion created by an image and the icons associated with it are very critical in the aisle. Our neurological observation has been that a store environment resembles a vast array of numbers and letters. It is as if the consumer just tapped into an Excel spreadsheet full of unrelated numbers and words.

As the consumer navigates through this ocean of numerical and semantic meaning, s/he looks for emotional landmarks—what we call an

“
oasis of emotions
”—where reason can take a break. The imagery and iconography in a package provide these emotional oases. We have found that imagery and iconography that are emotionally evocative provide very natural pop out for a package.

Another noteworthy finding is that the imagery that pops out is usually that which the consumer has seen before. We found that packages that represent scenes, images, or icons featured in TV advertising the consumer has seen resonate extremely well and pop out in the consumer’s mind. A classic example of this phenomenon is a face shown on a package that is also shown on TV. This facial recognition, which reminds consumers of something they have seen before, brings a degree of
implicit familiarity
to the package, even if that familiarity is not recognized consciously. From the neuromarketing perspective, the reason this is important is because the brain will focus first on what is familiar. Survival of the species has compelled and enabled our brains to possess this extraordinary capacity. Using imagery and iconography that is familiar yet connected to the brand makes a package visible in an otherwise cluttered environment.

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to recognize faces. So to the extent that the image or icon on a package can be represented by, or include a human face, that package tends naturally
to stand out from the clutter.
Because our brains are biologically programmed to scan for and identify faces in a sea of clutter, especially seeking some level of familiarity, it is strategically and tactically useful to leverage that fact in packaging design.

Imagery and iconography also work well when they are very relevant to the category in question. Across all categories of products, we find some common themes; one is an attentional and emotional boost from depicting the
source
of the product on the package. For example, on milk cartons we like to see cows. On orange juice containers, we like to see juicy oranges. On health and beauty packaging, flowers and dew drops. There is a natural attraction in the mind of the consumer for a depiction of the source of the product. We have found in numerous cases that packaging that uniquely positions and identifies salient aspects of a product’s sources turns out to be more effective than packaging that does not convey this information.

Font Structure:
We have observed that font structure plays an important role in a package’s pop-out propensity. Packages that have interesting, unique, or
“funky” fonts
convey a sense of whimsy and a sense of the product. The primary NeuroMetrics we use in analyzing font structure are Attention and Novelty. Some fonts appear to be implicitly aligned with a product or brand. They contribute to stand out by enabling rapid decoding of the product’s identity, even before the text is read and interpreted in the language centers of the brain. The distinctive script of Coca-Cola is an excellent example that expresses the brand even from a distance.

Another finding about fonts is: The
overuse of fonts creates
clutter
and turns off attention and emotional engagement. Our findings reveal that packages using more than two kinds and three sizes of fonts suffer precipitous drops in effectiveness versus packages with fewer fonts and font sizes.

Finally, we have found that even the directionality of the font on a package can be important. The eye and brain usually perceive things better from the outer edges to the center. They pay less attention to things that move from center to outer edges. From an evolutionary standpoint, therefore, objects, fonts, or words that appear to run from the periphery to the center of focus catch more attention. Text that creates the impression of moving away from the center toward the periphery appears to be retreating, so they are accorded less attention.

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Numerosity:
Simply put, this is a computation of the number or groups of information that must be processed or understood on a package. The primary NeuroMetrics for assessing the impact of numerosity are Attention and Awareness. Numerosity relates to a phenomenon called
“fluency of
processing,”
which is impacted by the number of clusters of objects or images shown. When a package consists of five or fewer distinct image groups, it is much easier for the brain to process than when more groups are present. That range enables greater fluency of cognitive processing and greater subconscious “enjoyment” of the package. Moreover, there is considerable neuroscientific evidence that an even smaller number of images, closer to three, may be even better for ease of processing.

Spatial Arrangement:
We have found that the arrangement and relative spatial positioning of imagery versus semantic content (words and numbers) has a huge impact on the overall effectiveness of the package. The core NeuroMetrics are Attention, Effectiveness, and Awareness. Some spatial arrangements seem to work better than others. For example, we have found that placing images on the left and words on the right is superior for rapid processing by the brain. This is because items in the left visual field are perceived by the right frontal lobe, whereas the right visual field is perceived by the left frontal lobe. Since the left frontal lobe is specialized in most people for interpreting semantics, while the right frontal lobe is specialized to process imagery and iconography, this
speeds
up processing
and contributes to a positive emotional impression. So, when you have imagery and iconography on the left and words and numbers on the right, a package design will be generally more effective, other factors being equal.

Colors:
Our studies have confirmed what is widely believed: Colors impact packaging in a deep way, akin to how music impacts the brain. Colors, like music, appear to provide an unarticulated emotional response to the package. The primary NeuroMetrics we use to study color are Attention and Emotion. While it is useful to study the package in isolation, we have found that lighting in the aisle also impacts the neurological effectiveness of the package. It is very important and useful to study the package with the right parameters of lighting; specifically, those that most effectively simulate the shopping experience.

Our research shows that
cultural differences impact responses
to color
in a significant way. In conducting global studies, we have discovered intriguing correlations between colors with strong cultural connotations within a society, and the colors common in nature surrounding that culture. The Deep Subconscious Response technique P1: OTA/XYZ

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enables us to determine the subconscious impacts of different choice of colors in different cultures.

Shape:
We have evaluated
the shape of packaging
to determine if and how it contributes to the pop-out power of the package. We have found that the shape of the package creates more than a simple visual appeal—it can actually reinforce the brain’s natural proclivity to simulate holding the package and enjoying the product. The primary NeuroMetrics we use to study shape are Attention, Emotion, and Novelty. We also monitor the level to which different aspects of shape—lines, contours, and/or unique features—attract attention and emotionally engage the brain. To the extent that the shape of the package draws the consumer’s interest, eye gaze will follow the curves and the primary outlines of the most novel design components. We have found that packages with unique and novel features that stimulate tactile contact work better than packages without such features.

Also, packages that facilitated
a comfortable fit in the hand
presented the greatest stimulation and trumped those that did not. We, therefore, monitor carefully the extent to which a package or product design accommodates a comfortable fit in the hand, as this seems to contribute to attention and emotional engagement.