Current Topic: Research

Shoppers increasingly consider the naturalness of products. Typically, natural products are preferred in categories in which naturalness is considered important. But what does naturalness have to do with the package of the product? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Let’s look at the images below. Which of the products do you consider to be most natural?

Supermarkets display packaged and unpackaged versions of products across a number of categories in-store and online. Restaurants also display products with and without packaging. Starbucks, for example, instructs its employees to remove bakery items from their individual packages before placing them unpackaged in a display case, only to re-package them for the customer upon purchase. The question is: what effect does this have on consumer preference, and purchase likelihood?

In this blog, we will discuss how packaging food has an effect on perceived naturalness  (i.e., originating from plants, animals, or humans) and thereby on purchase intentions. Let’s dive in…

The average internet user is bombarded with a stream of online banners on a daily basis. From promotional offers to brand advertisements, these digital displays attempt to capture our attention while navigating websites, tempting us to engage with the advertised content. But what differentiates an effective banner from a forgettable one? How can marketers cut through the noise and leave a lasting impression on their target audience?

Sustainability is become a more important brand asset with the years. Additionally, the majority of consumers have the intention to pay more for environmentally sustainable packaging (Popovic et al., 2020). However, consumers often don’t know what sustainable packaging should look like (Boz et al., 2020). Mostly, consumers categorize packaging in one of three categories: recyclable, re-usable or wasteful.

Rationally speaking, forms wouldn’t have a taste. A circle is a circle and that’s that. Or isn’t it quite that simple?

Although shape and taste are two different sensory experiences, shape does influence taste. Researchers have found that we as humans associate taste qualities with different design features such as curvature, texture, orientation, symmetry, and so on. In fact, the shape of everything, from the product itself to the typeface in which it is presented and the shapes of/on product packaging have all been shown to influence people’s expectations, and sometimes even their experiences.

In this blog we will take a closer look at how shape influences taste and how you could use that knowledge to increase the attractiveness of your product.

The purpose of food packaging has evolved a lot from what it used to be. At first, packaging was mainly used as a means to preserve and transport food items. Later, it was used as a way to gain consumers’ attention in shops and influence their preferences. More recently, a growing interest has been placed on how packaging can contribute to the multisensory experience of consumption.

But how come that something like packaging, which does not objectively alter the actual taste of food, can have so much impact? Let’s delve into how visual elements on food packaging can change taste expectations!