In their battle for customer attention, food packaging designers are eager to implement techniques from psychology. It gives them an edge over their competitors in grabbing customer attention and increasing sales.

Especially in the aisles containing your typical vice products, most purchases are unplanned. This leaves a major role for on-pack visuals and claims to determine which products end up in our shopping baskets. 

Over the years, consumer psychologists have unearthed many of these design techniques, which are often quite eloquent and subtle, such as:

• Getting the typography right (did you know that round fonts reinforce our perception of sweetness?)
• Cleverly arranging the various visual elements (did you know that bottom-heavy pack designs increases our perception of the amount of product we’ll be getting)
• Using nature’s principles of beauty (did you know that designs following the golden ratio are regarded more beautiful?)

As we focus on ever-more subtle design techniques, we may be overlooking the most powerful weapons of influence that are in front of our faces all along. A recent study by Huang et al., (2022) has thrown the spotlight on one such factors: image size.

You may sometimes purposely forgo reading the front-of-package (FOP) labels on the packaging of food goods. The main reason could be to ignore the unhealthiness of the chosen option and let your tastebuds revel in its sugary glory. Other reasons include the difficulty to read and the misleading nature of the labels, leaving the consumer in a state of confusion. If the label is hard to understand, you won’t want to read it and you won’t make a healthy decision.

In this paper, the researchers focus on sugar content and evaluate a novel FOP label’s effectiveness on participants’ preference for the healthier option when presented with various food choices. This was achieved by proposing categories in terms of their simplicity: simple options with few ingredients (smoothies), mid-complexity options with a shortlist of ingredients (yoghurts), and complex options with many ingredients (ready meals). Along with increasing complexity, the sugar content also increases; the smoothie has less sugar than the yoghurt, which has less sugar than the ready meal.

These food options were proposed with the traffic light system or the sugar-spoon label, representing the number of teaspoons of sugar contained in the product. By comparing a standard traffic-light label system versus their invented sugar-spoon label, the researchers found that the participants’ choices were healthier when the product presented was of simple composition (vs complex composition) and adopted their sugar-spoon label (vs the traffic light label).

The study concluded that the sugar-spoon label is more effective at favoring the choice of low-sugar content food goods than the regular traffic light label.

What cognitive process allows for this healthier decision? Find out below.

We may have just uncovered the secret behind unboxing videos: activating viewers’ mirror neurons so that they feel the hands and objects in the scene are theirs.

This new phenomenon labeled the Vicarious Haptic Effect is so strong that not even contagion warnings were enough to halt it, making viewers value a product more highly (both psychologically and monetarily) despite the risk to their health.

But here’s a caveat: the displayed hand interaction must be meaningful, showing what the scientists call “diagnosticity”. Let's find out more!

Imagine coming across an ad saying that the advertised shoes will help to tone your muscles and burn extra calories, or that snail oil will cure all acne. You might think that you won’t fall for this claim. But in fact, a lot of people will. Consumers falling for misleading and fraudulent claims isn’t something new. But since social media is rapidly evolving, false information spreads faster and wider than ever.

How do we interpret the credibility of information and what influences if we’re going to believe false claims?

Tiffany’s blue box. Apple’s all-white packaging. McDonald’s red happy meal. Consumer behavior is often affected not so much by the product itself as it is by the packaging that the product comes in. Packaging of a product sets high expectations for the product within, as well as provoking positive or negative reactions in the purchasing decision. While many studies have shown the importance of proper packaging of consumer goods, little is known about the use of implied motion - the ability to perceive dynamic elements within a static image (Yu et al., 2022) - until now.

Let's look into the influence of packaging displaying images with motion on consumers'  behavior!