Holistic Package Design and Consumer Brand Impressions

Abstract

This article develops empirically based guidelines to assist managers in selecting or modifying package designs for achieving desired consumer responses. Seven studies identify the key types of package designs, including the factors that differentiate those package designs, and determine how these holistic designs are related to consumer brand impressions. The selection of package designs can be simplified with the use of five holistic types: massive, contrasting, natural, delicate, and nondescript designs. Sincere brands should have natural package designs, exciting brands should have contrasting designs, competent brands should have delicate designs, sophisticated brands should have natural or delicate designs, and rugged brands should have contrasting or massive designs. The authors discuss the potential trade-offs among the impressions created by holistic design types and illustrate their findings with numerous real packages.

The Influence of Excessive Product Packaging on Green Brand Attachment: The Mediation Roles of Green Brand Attitude and Green Brand Image

“…Product packaging is a part of the product and its brand [26], which showcases the characteristics of the brand [27]. In general, product packaging should be attractive, protective and unwrapped easily.…”

Crafting the market for bottled water: a social praxeology approach

“…The materiality of the container plays a central role in constituting brand image. It supports symbolic representations by companiesbut also by consumers -enabling the latter to derive their own meanings from package design, construction, size, volume, transparency, color, shape and label (Orth and Malkewitz, 2008;Race, 2012).Innovations in containers for BW, their labels and the imagery that accompanied popular brands, are best understood as attempts to provide multiple subject positions, some more connoisseur-like, while others reflected a physiological-instrumental position. Supermarket shelves are weighed down with various sizes and shapes, all jostling for customer attention.…”

“…The materiality of the container plays a central role in constituting brand image. It supports symbolic representations by companiesbut also by consumers -enabling the latter to derive their own meanings from package design, construction, size, volume, transparency, color, shape and label (Orth and Malkewitz, 2008;Race, 2012).…”

Multi-level labelling: too complex for consumers?

“…Hence, information overload is the basic underlying issue of food packaging labelling systems (cf. Harper, et al, 2007;Orth & Malkewitz, 2008;Sørensen et al, 2012). Nevertheless, consumer choices can be better informed with multi-level label systems as results by Andrews et al (2011), Kelly et al (2009) and Roberto et al (2012) confirm.…”

“…For instance, detailed information can be provided in text form, alone or in addition to using other labels. Besides the difficulties that consumers have in comprehending complex information on the package (Harper et al, 2007), packaging can often appear overloaded with illustrations, trademarks, labels and text (Orth & Malkewitz, 2008), which makes it difficult for consumers to distinguish important information. The presence of information on the packaging is therefore limited by the capability of the consumer to process (Verbeke, 2005) and comprehend it (Sørensen et al, 2012).…”