Impact of packaging on consumer behaviour

Abstract

Packaging for a product was once functional in nature, i.e. to protect the original product from damage or to make the transportation/storage easy. With increasing competition, its function has changed from just a protection tool to something that adds extra value to the product. Packaging of a product has two elements verbal and visual. Colour, graphics, size and shape are the visual elements while product information is the verbal part. These elements have now become an important tool of marketing at the point of purchase. Packaging is known as industry’s “silent marketer”. This contemporary research aims to study consumer behaviour towards packaging elements across product categories, store formats and other factors affecting point of purchase using a full factorial experimental set up. The factors affecting consumer behaviour at the point of purchase like various store formats, level of involvement whole buying products and time pressure were identified after literature review. Depth interviews and focused group discussions were conducted as a part of our exploratory study which validated our earlier findings related to factors like level of involvement during and store formats. Other factors like time pressure were ruled out as it was out of contextual importance. We then designed a 2x3 (store format x product category) full factorial experimental setup. Different levels of these factors are - Store Formats o Kirana Store o Super Market. Product Category Low Involvement product o Medium Involvement product o High Involvement product the product that was considered in the experiment for the primary research are, viz. Low Involvement product – Biscuits Medium Involvement product – Shampoo High Involvement product – Ready to Eat (RTE) Meals There were 54 respondents who took part in our experiment. We analysed various combinations of the factors and validated the following hypothesis H1: The Level of involvement is the same for the product categories (high, medium, and low involvement). H2: The chances of reading the product information is the same for high involvement product and low involvement product across store formats (Kirana and Super Market) H3: The impact of package size and shape is the same for high involvement product and low involvement product across store formats (Kirana and Super Market) At the end of our research, it was concluded that packaging information/ labelling and packaging size and shape have significant impact across product categories and store factors. Visual elements like colour/graphics celebrity photos etc do not vary across store formats and product categories