Packaging as a Communicator of Brand Personality: Comparing the importance of the whole and the details

Abstract: While practitioners have started acknowledging the importance of packaging design, the academic knowledge in the field is still lagging behind. More specifically, even though it has been shown that the majority of packaging fails to get the consumer's full attention in the retail setting, existing research has only approached packaging in settings where the consumer has no limitations on examining all aspects of the packaging or detail in question. These studies have shown that packaging has a great influence on the way consumers perceive the brand and product. However, this research aimed to fill this gap in existing research by finding out which aspects of packaging are responsible for communicating brand messages, and how the different levels of attention affect packaging's opportunity to do so. Through a quantitative experimental study this research has shown that the peripheral view of packaging, in which the object appears unclear and blurred, may play a bigger role in the impression formation as previously thought. More importantly, this impression may differ from the impression communicated by the product under full attention. As brand personality impressions have been linked to product choice, communicating the wrong message may decrease the packaging's opportunity to get more attention from the correct target group. In addition, the study presented in this paper has shown that the message conveyed by packaging cannot be fully predicted based on the details of the design - using a traditional logo and color does not automatically mean that the holistic packaging will be perceived as traditional. All in all, this research has found strong evidence that highlights the importance of considering packaging as a holistic 'Gestalt' rather than a group of individual details.