etc. The pre-test participants will be randomly selected and will have the same introduction to the study as the rest of the sample group. Because the experiment is divided into two experiments, it is found that in order to have internal validity, two pre-tests will be conducted for each experiment.
Introduction to the experiment
All participants will have the same verbal introduction prior to the experiment. The participants will be introduced as followed. All participants will be welcomed to the laboratory, were they will be introduced to the ET screen. They will be told how they will be exposed to approximately 30 pic-tures of everyday consumer goods. Half of the picpic-tures will have only the front of the product showing where the other half will be showing both the front and back of the product (fillers). For the products only showing the front, there will be unlimited time to look at the product and answer-ing the question provided on the screen, which will be in the form of a 7-point likert scale where the participant is to use the mouse to move the scale to fit with the participants answer to the provided question. For the pictures showing both the front and back of the product there will be limited view-ing time of 6 sec. After the 6 sec. there will be a few questions which the participant has unlimited time to answer. The answers will be given on a 7-point likert scale. Afterwards the participant will be placed on a chair in front of the ET screen and the experiment will begin.
Experimental setup
The participants will be placed in front of a computer with an in-built ET. Group one will all be ex-posed to the first experiment and group two will be exex-posed to the second experiment. Both groups will be exposed to 15 product images related to this study and 15 product images related to another master thesis groups study. These 15 other product images will function as fillers in order to avoid that the participant will know what the experiment is really about.
Both groups will be exposed to pictures of products with abstract and concrete visual imagery. Half of the pictures will be products with abstract visual imagery and the other half will be with concrete visual imagery. If for example group one is exposed to a marmalade containing an abstract visual imagery, group two will be exposed to the same product but with a concrete visual imagery. All of the products originally contained an abstract product imagery but have been manipulated in Pho-toshop in order to create a counter product containing a concrete product imagery. The concrete product imagery will be manipulated as close to the original abstract one as possible. For all of the
products, the background has also been manipulated in order to remove all other abstract elements e.g. patterns. All other variables of the products will be held constant. The two sample groups will be exposed to approximately the same amount of abstract and concrete visual imagery as well as quality and luxurious related questions.
For the experiment, all products will be placed slightly to the left side on the ET screen in order to avoid middle fixation bias. Between each new product there will be a fixation point in the form of a little red point in the middle of the screen. This is placed in order to “reset” the fixation of the par-ticipants. If the products were placed in the middle of the screen, it is expected that the participants would fixate on the middle of the product when the image changes since this is where their eyes are already fixating due to the fixation point. All products will be of a somewhat realistic size in order to keep the experiment as realistic as possible. Above the product the task is given formulated as either “How luxurious/non-luxurious do you perceive the following product to be?” or “How do you perceive the quality of the following product?”
The participants will have unlimited time to study the products and will only be able to move on to the next when they have answered the question presented on the screen. The participants will be able to place the marker anywhere on the 7-point likert scale and have to move the marker from the default placement in order to move on. It is important for the analysis that the participants are only to answer one question for each product (quality/luxuriousness) in order to analyze which stimuli they fixate on in order to make their decision. If both questions were to be answered it would not be possible to distinguish between which stimuli they rely on to evaluate quality and which they rely on in order to evaluate luxuriousness.
The products and the filler products will all be randomized for each experiment. The following pic-tures shows four of the products with its visual imagery both the abstract illustration and its manip-ulated counterpart with the concrete photograph and examples of the setup for the two sample groups. All the 15 product packaging designs used for the experiment can be found in appendix 1.
Hvilken kvalitet synes du dette produkt er?
Lav kvalitet Høj kvalitet
Hvilken kvalitet synes du dette produkt er?
Lav kvalitet Høj kvalitet
Hvilken kvalitet synes du dette produkt er? v kvalitet Høj kvalitet Hvilken kvalitet synes du dette produkt er? Lav kvalitet Høj kvalitet 82
Follow up questions
At the end of the experiment all participants in both sample groups were to fill out a questionnaire (appendix 2). The questions of interest to this study is gender, age, to what extent they know the Gestus brand, and to what extent they agree that the brand represents quality. The questionnaire contained further questions, which were only relevant to the study set out by the collaborating mas-ter thesis group. These can be found in appendix 2.
Fillers
The experimental distractions will be in the form of another master student groups experiment, which seeks to answer, to some extent, similar self-reported questions and have a similar set up of the presented study. The ET images of the two groups will be randomly mixed for the setup. The distracting group’s images will contain an image of one consumer good showing both the front and the back side. The viewing time will be 6sec and afterwards the participants will be presented with questions about the products, which they are to answer on a 7-point likert scale. They have unlim-ited time to answer the questions.
Interview
Before the lockdown of Denmark, the authors of this thesis reached out to Dagrofa knowing that they are using both illustrations and photographs as product images on their product packaging de-sign. The ET experiment only uses products from Gestus, which is a private labeled brand owned by Dagrofa and are only available in Dagrofa’s own stores. However, in the experiment all indica-tions of the brand (e.g. logo) have been removed in order to limit the chance of the participants
Example of a filler
recognizing the products and in order to limit brand biases. The private label “Gestus´s” product packaging design for their household products all contains a product or product related image, which all are abstract illustrations according to this thesis pre-test. It would therefore be interesting to interview one of their marketing and/or product design employees to gain insights into the back-ground and reasoning for these design decisions and whether they have done any experiments or consumer research to base their choices on. The following questions were prepared for the inter-view.
Interview questions
The interview was set out to be semi structured, giving the possibility to add questions as subjects arise and at the same time keeping a structured overview of subjects and questions which have to be covered to understand their decision process, to answer the thesis research question and develop in-teresting discussion points based on the answers and the results found in the ET experiment.
• Would you please start out by introducing yourself and your main responsibilities in the company and in relation to product development and design?
• How would you describe the positioning of each of your brands?
• What initiatives have you taken to emphasize this positioning?
• What considerations go into the decision of how to design different product packaging de-sign?
• How do you determine the product packaging design of a new product?
• Do you perform any type of consumer research in accordance to which packaging design to use for a product prior to releasing it, if yes how?
• Do you have a standardized product packaging design depending on the product type/cate-gory?
• Have you built guidelines of how product packaging for your different private label brands should look like? If yes, what are the guidelines for each brand?
• Is it a well-thought strategy how Gestus uses illustrations while First Price have photo-graphs?
• Do you consider what product categories fit the specific brands? Have you given thought to how Gestus range of products might have a more hedonic value and do not include necessity goods?
• Are there any managerial and/or experimental reasons for why you use abstract imagery (il-lustrations) for your Gestus products?
• Do you see a difference in the communicative value of illustrations vs. photographs. What are the perks of illustrations? What benefits are there with photographs on the product pack-aging design?
• Do you perceive your Gestus product imagery to be abstract?
• Do you have any statistics showing that abstract imagery (illustrations) works better for some product and concrete imagery (photographs) works better for other types of prod-ucts?
• Have you tested out abstract vs. concrete imagery on your products? if yes, what were the findings?
• Have you given thought into how different product packaging works for different products?
Some Gestus products have both illustrations of what the product contains while also having photographs of the product? Have you had any specific considerations in terms of that?
• Have you ever changed a product imagery after releasing the product? If yes, what was the reasons for this and what did you change it from and to?
• Do you think that the concept of abstract and concrete imagery has an effect on fast moving consumer goods and consumers’ willingness to buy?
• Do you think it will have any effect on the product perception such as quality and luxurious-ness if you replaced all your abstract food product images with concrete images?