Optimising the effectiveness of container packaging design: How shape influences customer proportion judgments
Abstract
While brands, advertisements and social media feeds are important routes to attracting and converting customers, packaging can contribute to the overall customer experience. From making a lasting first impression to inspiring positive reviews based on the ‘unboxing experience’, great packaging has the ability to wow customers and set a company apart from its competition. This paper highlights the important role packaging plays in decisions where customers make proportion judgments using packaging containers as references. The authors first introduce a system of psychophysical models to describe how evaluability conditions influence judgments of proportion and pouring volume. The paper proceeds to examine these conditions using laboratory experiments with real adult customers. They show that the elongation of a packaging container causes customers to pour more to reach target proportions, an effect that is maximised when the proportion of content to container is 1/e (or approximately 36.79 per cent). The final section of the paper focuses on the managerial implications. The recommendations will help companies achieve a better understanding of customer visual processing biases and the strategic benefits that container packaging design can offer to a business.
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Author's Biography
Shenyu Li graduated from University of Alberta. He is currently a teaching fellow at Sydney Institute of Language and Commerce at Shanghai University. His work has appeared in Marketing Letters, Journal of Strategic Marketing, among others.
Rong Huang is an associate professor of marketing at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She earned her PhD degree in marketing from McGill University. Her research on brand equity and marketing strategy has been published in such journals as the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Travel Research and Journal of Environmental Management. She has also contributed to books on fashion marketing. She has been a consultant for companies ranging from the retailing industry to the automobile industry. She has received research funding at the national and international level, including from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Hong Yuan is an associate professor of marketing and Director of the Business Research Institute at the Lundquist College of Business. She is also a research economist for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research interests include firms’ pricing and promotion strategies; consumers’ responses to pricing and promotion strategies; consumer information search; and experimental and behavioural economics. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Academy of Marketing Science and the Journal of Global Academy of Marketing Science. Her work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
Qiong Zhou is an assistant professor of management at the College of Business, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She received her PhD in economics from the University of Florida. Her research interests include corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, consumer behaviour and applied econometrics. Her work has been published in Management and Organization Review and Frontier of Economics in China.
Citation
Li, Shenyu, Huang, Rong, Yuan, Hong and Zhou, Qiong (2018, April 1). Optimising the effectiveness of container packaging design: How shape influences customer proportion judgments. In the Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 4, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.69554/KMZR2354.
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