What they see is what they get? An fMRI‐study on neural correlates of attractive packaging

Abstract

There is evidence in neuroscience that the brain processes negative visual stimuli in a different manner than positive ones. Our study investigates, whether it is possible to transfer these findings to one specific, often-neglected marketing stimulus, package design. For this purpose, we measured the brain activity of subjects while they had to make decisions about the attractiveness of certain fast moving consumer good packages. As predicted by consumer neuroscience, we found that attractive and unattractive packages are able to trigger different cortical activity changes. Contrasting attractive versus unattractive packages, revealed significant cortical activity changes in visual areas of the occipital lobe and the precuneus -regions associated with the processing of visual stimuli and attention. On the individual level, we found significant activity changes within regions of reward processing. On the other hand by contrasting unattractive versus attractive packages we found an increased activity in areas of the frontal lobe and insula cortex, regions often associated with processing aversive stimuli such as unfair offers or disgusting pictures. Although, these results are without any doubt preliminary they might explain why attractive packages gain more attention at the point-of-sale and this, in turn, positively influences turnovers of fast moving consumer goods. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. IntroductionResearch in consumer behavior has always been influenced by the integration of other scientific disciplines, such as mathematics, sociology, and perhaps in the first place, psychology.Recent years have seen the development of a new integrative discipline which can be labeled as ''neuromarketing'' or ''consumer neuroscience.'' The goal of this emerging discipline is the transfer of insights from neurology to research in consumer behavior by applying neuroscientific methods (i.e., neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic imaging (fMRI)) to marketing relevant problems. Current studies in the field of consumer neuroscience are connected with structural marketing topics, such as buying behavior , branding (McClure et al., 2004; Deppe et al., 2005b;Yoon et al., 2006) or advertising (Klucharev et al., 2005). One major finding of these studies is the high level impact of emotions and affect on customers' decision-making processes. For instance, the study of Deppe et al. (2005b) showed that strong brands trigger emotions that influence decision-making. In a similar vain McClure et al. (2004) and Plassmann et al. (2007) demonstrated that the brain activity and the expressed preferences may change when consumers are exposed to brand information. Moreover, the investigations of Plassmann et al. (2007) revealed that customer loyalty is associated with activity changes in the (neural) reward system. In a recent, groundbreaking study, reported that the activation of the nucleus accumbens (NCC) seems to scale with product preferences of a consumer, and that excessive prices can lead to an activation...

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