The purpose of this thesis was to answer the research question “How are consumers affected by the design of product packaging? And how can construal level theory be applied to product packaging and what implications would this give in the design process of the product packaging?”
Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to be able to investigate the research question.
The use of ET was chosen to give insight and increase knowledge of what consumers pay attention to and being able to quantify consumers interest in the different AOIs through biometric measures.
The qualitative methods were chosen as to give an increased knowledge through the in-depth inter-view if the use of illustrations or photographs was something that is already considered in the mar-keter’s design process of the product packaging and what their considerations in regards to applying one over the other was. Accompanying the interview, several theories were chosen to help analyze and answer the research question. The theory which were deemed most important to gain
knowledge within was CLT, decision-making, consumer behavior and product packaging design.
Furthermore, a literature review was conducted to gain an insight into how the visual imagery can be manipulated and how this affect consumers perception of a product as well as the mental con-strual level.
The first aspect of the research question was to analyze how consumers are affected by the design of the product packaging. Through reading secondary literature, it was found that the packaging de-sign of a product both affects consumers behavior and decision-making in terms of valuation of the product and the decision to buy it, as it is the product packaging that is used in brand identification and package comprehension. The value of the product packaging design is that it works as a com-municator to the consumer of what the product is and works to promote the content of the product packaging. Furthermore, the value of the product packaging is also related to what it communicates to peers about the consumer when choosing specific product packaging designs over others. The consumer’s value perception of a specific product is a trade-off between potential gains and losses.
Consumers in a purchase decision will rely on the product packaging design to evaluate the quality of the product and decide whether it is worth buying. The different risks the consumer considers when deciding to purchase something is functional, financial and social. The product packaging communicates cues that can help consumers in the evaluation of the different risks.
The second aspect of the research question of how CLT can be applied to product packaging it was chosen to focus on the visual imagery and how a manipulation of this could lead to affecting the level of mental construal. By combining different theories, that of CLT, visual perception and se-mantics definitions were made of what entailed an abstract visual imagery and what entailed a con-crete visual imagery. The abstract visual imagery is defined as an illustration of an object only en-tailing the central characteristics of the object’s shape and fewer observable characteristics lead-ing the object to bear some form of similarity or resemblance to the object it is depictlead-ing. The ab-stract visual imagery is therefore iconic, and a concrete visual imagery is defined as a photograph of an object meaning it is an exact depiction of the object and serves as a physical trace pointing to
the object's existence with its observable characteristics such as shape and color leading the object to be a direct representation of the physical object it is depicting. The concrete visual imagery is therefore indexical. The argument from CLT of how abstractness is associated with higher level construal while concreteness is associated with low level construal leads to the conclusion that ab-stract visual imagery depicted as illustrations lead consumers to form higher level mental construal whereas the concrete photographs lead the consumer to form lower level mental construal. It was argued that, since the level of mental construal is a continuum depending on the individual’s per-ception of the perceived psychological distance between them and the object and not a dichotomy of abstract and concrete, the level of construal of the visual imagery would also entail different di-mensions. An abstractness to concreteness dimension scale was created, showing the different de-grees of abstractness and concreteness that the visual imagery can entail (p. 57).
Building on the knowledge of how product packaging affect consumers evaluation of the product and how the level of mental construal affects consumers evaluation of objects it was expected that the product packaging design applying CLT would have an effect on the value consumers perceive to be tied to the product. Taking previous findings of how abstractness has been found to affect con-sumers to perceive the product as more luxurious as a starting point, it was assumed that when ap-plying CLT to the visual imagery on the product packaging design this would affect whether the consumer perceive the product as more or less luxurious depending on the level of abstractness of the visual imagery on the product packaging design. Thereby expecting that the more abstract the visual imagery, the more luxurious it would be perceived as and vice versa.
These assumptions were tested through an ET study. It is expected that the participants will rate the product packaging designs with an abstract illustration as more luxurious than the product packag-ing with the concrete photographs. The phraspackag-ing of makpackag-ing participants rate the quality of the prod-ucts as to have a word that is more associated with grocery prodprod-ucts, did however not show any sig-nificant difference between a product packaging design with illustration and one with a photograph, as both of these are expected to receive the same quality ratings. As attention has shown to play an important role in decision-making several hypotheses related to attention was formulated. The bio-metrics of fixation duration, number of revisits and time to first fixation showed to be indicators of whether the consumer perceives the visual imagery as abstract or concrete. It is expected that the more abstract the visual imagery is, the longer participants will fixate on the visual imagery and the quicker they will fixate on the text after looking at the visual imagery as a guidance to
interpreting what it is. Furthermore, the number of revisits to the visual imagery is expected to cate that the participants deemed the visual imagery on the product packaging to be a relevant indi-cator of the products luxuriousness and quality and furthermore needed more revisits to the abstract illustration to interpret what this was.
The final aspect of this thesis research question is what implication the application of product pack-aging design would give in the design process of the product packpack-aging. As the application of CLT to product packaging is expected to show an effect there are several implications tied to this as prac-titioners can use this to affect consumers in the direction that they want their products to be per-ceived as. If practitioners want their products to be perper-ceived as luxurious, the use of abstract visual imagery on the product packaging design will make consumers perceive it as more luxurious. Con-versely, if the wish is to keep the products to be perceived as more ordinary, the use of concrete photographs on the product packaging design will make consumers perceive it as more concrete and closer related to their everyday life. The concrete photographs being associated with a lower con-strual is most beneficially if the product category is e.g. necessity goods that is used every day and therefore feels psychologically closer to the consumer due to the low temporal construal.
The thesis’ study showed that even ordinary goods like food products can be manipulated to be per-ceived as more luxurious through the use of CLT. A product perper-ceived as luxurious has its benefit for some product categories if they can fulfill any of the 5 dimension that can establish luxury which are perceived extended self, perceived uniqueness, perceived quality, perceived conspicuous-ness and perceived hedonic value. The product that fulfill just one of these dimensions would bene-fit from the use of abstract illustrations on the product packaging leading the consumer to perceive the product as more luxurious.