University of Aarhus From the SelectedWorks of Polymeros Chrysochou
2012
Can packaging elements elicit consumers’ emotional responses? Lewis Liao, University of South Australia Armando Corsi, University of South Australia Larry Lockshin, University of South Australia Polymeros Chrysochou
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/chrysochou/38/
Can packaging elements elicit consumers’ emotional responses? Author: LEWIS LIAO - Email:
[email protected] University: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA Track: Advertising, Promotion and Marketing Communications Co-author(s): Lewis Liao (University of South Australia) / Armando Corsi (University of South Australia) / Larry Lockshin (University of South Australia) / Polymeros Chrysochou (Aarhus University)
Access to this paper is restricted to registered delegates of the EMAC 2012 Conference.
Can packaging elements elicit consumers’ emotional responses? Abstract Emotion has been an important concept in many areas of consumer research such as judgment, decision-making and advertising. Little research has been done on emotion in packaging adopting the physiological measures used in other areas. This paper draws on past studies in advertising that measure emotional responses toward image, colour and font, and apply them to packaging research. The study tests the extent at which packaging can elicit consumers’ spontaneous emotional response for each of those three elements, by using skin conductance, facial electromyography (EMG) and selfassessment scales. The results show that packaging can elicit an emotional response via different elements. The paper also raises concerns about the accuracy of using selfreport measures of emotional responses to packaging research. Keywords: packaging, emotion, affect, physiological measures Track: Advertising, Promotion and Marketing Communication
1. Introduction Recent research on consumer affective response to the visual aspect of packaging has focused on qualitative and self-report-based quantitative methods (Heinio, 2010; Lajos & Chattopadhyay, 2011), while recent studies of consumer emotional responses to other marketing stimuli such as print and TV adverting have progressed by using physiological measures (Hazlett & Hazlett, 1999; Micu & Plummer, 2010; Poels & Dewitte, 2006). Packaging is an important part of marketing communications, but physiological research on consumer emotional responses is still underexplored. This paper contributes to this relatively new area by using physiological measures to study emotional responses to packaging. The objective is to measure whether consumers have an unconscious emotional reaction in response to different package designs. 2. Why Emotion is Important in Packaging Research? Consistent with Poels, Karolien and Dewitte (2006) and Shiv and Fedorikhin (1999), affect comprises two main components: short-term, unconscious emotions (i.e. spontaneous affective reactions that differ in two dimensions, valence and intensity), and feelings (which are self-reportable emotions or deliberate affective reactions that involves conscious cognitive thinking). We focus on the first component. Literature in neuroscience and psychology shows that emotion has a strong impact on attention (Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001; Vuillemier, 2005). In today’s fast paced and information rich society, getting consumer’s attention is a pre-requisite for a brand to be considered in any in-store choice. Poels and Dewitte (2008) suggest that emotional reactions to commercial print advertisements guide attention and action automatically. Vuilleumier (2005) finds that affect might supplement, but also compete with other sources of cognitive top-down control to influence attention, which is referred to as ‘emotional attention’. It could well be the case that emotionally positive packages could help capture more bottom-up or stimuli based attention (as opposed to top-down or task motivated attention) for a particular brand. Not only do emotions help with attracting attention, they also play an important role in consumer choice and decision-making. According to Poels and Dewitte (2006), in the case of low involvement products, attention together with pleasurable feelings can lead immediately to the acceptance of the message, without explicit learning. This argument is in line with Shiv and Fedorikhin (1999), who find that consumers’ decisions can be influenced by spontaneous subconscious affective responses from the stimulus, which involve little or no cognitive thinking. In addition, findings in neuroscience note that affect is an important heuristic in systematically guiding judgments and decisions (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002). Little cognitive effort occurs when consumers are facing aisles of shelves full of homogeneous consumer goods and only spend a few seconds on brand choice in retail stores (Dickson & Sawyer, 1990). In the current packaging literature, past studies on emotion are limited and mostly of qualitative nature (Nancarrow, Wright, & Brace, 1998; Rundh, 2009; Silayoi & Speece, 2004). Moreover, previous studies used self-report and self-report measures to evaluate consumers’ emotional responses to packaging (Gofman, Moskowitz, Fyrbjork, Moskowitz, & Mets, 2009). Self-report might not be a valid method to measure unconscious emotional responses to packaging, as these are likely to be temporary, fleeting and hard to verbalize (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Previous research using verbal self-report methods for emotion analysis might be flawed because these subjective measures only report feelings that are
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disguised or post-rationalized by the respondent (Penn, 2006). This led us to our first research question: ‘Can packaging evoke (spontaneous) physiological-measured emotion at all?’ 3. Package Elements and Affect The first element considered in this study is image. Image is one of the most common and eye-catching elements in packaging design. Images have been found to have a strong effect on participants’ affective judgments (i.e. pleasure and arousal) measured by skin conductance and facial EMG (Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993). Moreover, the effect of images on human affective responses exists even when the presentation of the images are rapid (Smith, Low, Bradley, & Lang, 2006). Another fundamental package element is colour. Empirical studies show that the red and yellow are more arousing than blue and green (Jacobs & Hustmyer, 1992; Schauss, 1985; Wilson, 1966) More recently, Abbas, Kumar and McLachlan (2005) exposed subjects to eight different colours at various light intensities and revealed changes in heart rate, skin conductance and self-assessment reports of arousal and valence. The third element is typography (font). In most of the cases, the brand name on the front of a pack is often located in a key position. Typography is therefore believed to represent an important element to influence consumer responses, but the effect is still not widely studied in past research (Henderson, Giese, & Cote, 2004). Among other findings, Henderson et al. (2004) found that natural, script typefaces are more reassuring and pleasing than simple, nonornate fonts. In addition, Gofman (2009) suggested that fancy fonts on labels could help consumers feel more energized. 4. Method 4.1 Stimuli, participants and apparatus Considering the literature described above, we chose image, colour and font as the main elements for our experimental design. More specifically, the design was a 3 (image) x 2 (colour) x 2 (font) full-factorial design. The levels and details are described in Table 1. The product was chocolate bars and a series of packages were created by a professional graphic designer by combining the different levels of the above mentioned attributes. The brand name and the overall package design were fictitious to eliminate prior brand experiences. The sample consisted of 120 participants recruited on a voluntarily basis from 2 university campuses in a large Australian city. All participants had normal or corrected-tonormal vision (i.e. glasses, contact lenses, etc.). Equal numbers of males and females took part in the study. Table 1: Factors and levels for the chocolate package Factors Levels Detail No Image Image absent Image Positive Image A happy baby Negative Image A vicious dog Low wavelength colour Blue (Pantone code: 2728C) Colour High wavelength colour Red (Pantone code: 485C) San Serif Myriad Pro Font Ornate script Edwardian 3
All experimental sessions were conducted in the same lab room, set up exclusively for the study during September 2011. Each session lasted for about 30 minutes. The lab room was kept quiet, air-conditioned and dimly lit. A computer was set up for the completion of separate surveys before and after the experiment. Another computer was equipped with the software BioGraph Infinity, a multimedia biofeedback software and a ProComp 2 hardware system. BioGraph Infinity was programed according to the experimental design to precisely control the display of on screen instructions and different stimuli (i.e. 12 packaging images). The ProComp 2 hardware system was connected with skin conductance and facial EMG sensors to measure the intensity and valence of emotional responses, respectively (Hazlett & Hazlett, 1999; Lang, et al., 1993; Poels & Dewitte, 2006). 4.2 Procedure After arrival at the laboratory participants were asked to turn off mobile phones to eliminate any potential electromagnetic interference. As a first task, each participant was asked to complete an online survey designed to measure their product usage, self-reported emotional intensity and some demographic questions. After the completion of the survey, the researcher briefly explained the procedures and prepared the participant for the physiological assessment. The two-ended SC sensors were attached to the tip area of the middle and index finger on left hand. The two facial EMG (positive and negative) sensors were placed over the corrugator supercilii muscle region above the right side of the eyebrow (Tassinary, Cacioppo, & Geen, 1989). After that, each participant was instructed to sit comfortably and remain still during the entire assessment (2-3mins). Each participant was also asked to limit eye blinks as much as possible and pay attention to each package image once the recording period started. All of the participants were able to fulfil these requirements. The duration and the order of display for each package image were precisely controlled by the computer. Each package was displayed for 6 seconds with 6 seconds black screen between any two images. At the end of each assessment, the electrodes were removed and the participants were informed of the true purpose of the physiological assessment. Next, each participant filled out the second questionnaire about their perception of each pack that was displayed during the task. The Self-Assessment Manikin scale (SAM, a non-verbal pictorial assessment technique) (Bradley & Lang, 1994) and a 5-point scale likability question were used in the survey to measure the self-reported emotional valence and intensity of each package. 4.3 Data reduction and analysis The ProComp 2 hardware system has filters to automatically reduce movement and eye blink-related artefacts. In addition, each session recording was visually inspected for artefacts but no noticeable artefacts were detected. Raw session data were then exported to Excel. There were 23 samples of data per second collected for each recording, with one channel for skin conductance and one for facial EMG data. Skin conductance response was measured by subtracting the maximum value between 1 second and 6 seconds after picture onset from the average value during 1 second before image onset (Klauer, 2011). Facial EMG reactivity was measured as the difference between the mean activity during the 6-second image display and the mean activity during 1 second before image onset (Lang, et al., 1993). Outliers were checked using z-scored data, however no significant outliers were found. All original data were then subjected to a square-root transformation to normalize the data sets (Larsen & Norris, 2009; Tassinary, et al., 1989). Standardized SCR and standardized facial EMG
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responses data were exported and merged into one single SPSS file together with the data collected by the two online questionnaires. 5. Results Data were analysed with a repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results revealed a significant main effect of image on the intensity of emotion (Table 2). The main effect of colour was not significant, and neither was the main effect of font suggesting no evidence of substantial differences in the intensity of participants’ emotional responses to different fonts or colours. For the valence of emotion, the results indicate that image had a significant main effect on the facial EMG responses of participants, with the baby image positively and the dog image negatively valenced. However, colour and font did not affect the facial EMG responses suggesting no substantial difference in the valance of emotional responses to different fonts and colour. Table 2: Main effects summary Elements Intensity p η2 Image 0.001 0.11 Colour 0.91 0.00 Font 0.45 0.01
Valence p 0.001 0.23 0.37
η2
0.12 0.01 0.01
Post hoc analysis further revealed that intensity differences were significant between packs with a positive and a negative image (p=0.001) and were also significant between packs without an image and packs with a negative image (p=0.049). While the mean arousal reaction (intensity) to pack in absence of an image were lower than packs with a positive image, it was not statistically significant (p=0.137). The valence effect of image on pack between positive and negative image was significant (p=0.001). A significant difference also exists between packs in absence of an image and packs with a positive image (p=0.001). Although the mean facial EMG reaction to packs with a negative image showed that participants responded more negatively than packs without an image, the difference was not statically significant (p=0.381). 6. Discussion and Conclusion Physiological data revealed that packages do evoke consumers’ emotional response in terms of intensity and valence. The statistical analysis revealed that image is the only element in our study that had a significant main effect on intensity and valence of emotion. Packs with a positive image do evoke higher arousal than packs with a negative image or without an image. Moreover, participants responded negatively to packs with a negative image versus positive responses to packs with a positive image. Therefore a well-designed image or graphic might be the most powerful way pack designers can use to elicit consumers’ stronger and more positive spontaneous emotional responses. While past studies based on self-report methods claim that colour and font impact consumer emotional responses, no statistical evidence supported this finding in our study. This discrepancy provides evidence that spontaneous emotion is a different construct to feeling (self-reportable) and it cannot be measured accurately using self-report methods
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(Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Post-rationalisation or specific long-term memories retrieved using cognition could potentially make self-report measures differ from those obtained from spontaneous physiological measurements. As consumers pay attention on average only few seconds to each package during their shopping trips, spontaneous emotional responses measured at a physiological level might be a more accurate reflection of consumers’ true affective state in response to packages on shelves in supermarkets. This should make researchers question if the self-report method used by many companies to evaluate different packaging designs can tell the full story and should stimulate further research in the packaging area. References Abbas, N., Kumar, D., & Mclachlan, N. (2005). The Psychological and Physiological Effects of Light and Colour on Space Users. In Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference (pp. 4). Shanghai, China. Bradley, M., & Lang, P. (1994). Measuring emotion: the self-‐assessment manikin and the semantic differential. Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry, 25(1), 49-‐59. Dickson, P. R., & Sawyer, A. G. (1990). The Price Knowledge and Search of Supermarket Shoppers. Journal of Marketing, 54(July), 42-‐53. Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (2002). Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gofman, A., Moskowitz, H., Fyrbjork, J., Moskowitz, D., & Mets, T. (2009). Extending Rule Developing Experimentation to Perception of Food Packages with Eye Tracking. Open Food Science Journal, 3, 66-‐78. Hazlett, R. L., & Hazlett, S. Y. (1999). Emotional response to television commercials: Facial EMIG vs. self-‐report. Journal of Advertising Research, 39(2). Heinio, S. (2010). Seeing the Scent of Garden -‐ Package Design as a Channel to Multisensory Experience. In EMAC. Copenhagen. Henderson, P. W., Giese, J. L., & Cote, J. A. (2004). Impression management using typeface design. Journal of Marketing, 68(October), 60-‐72. Jacobs, K., & Hustmyer, F. (1992). Effects of Four Psychological Primary Colors on GSR, Heart Rate and Respiration Rate. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 38(3), 763-‐766. Klauer, K. (2011). Cognitive Methods in Social Psychology: Guilford Press. Lajos, J., & Chattopadhyay. (2011). Effects of Package Color on Consumers’ Judgments of Product Volumes. In EMAC. Ljubliana, Slovenia. Lang, P., Greenwald, M., Bradley, M., & Hamm, A. (1993). looking at pictures: affective, facial, visceral, and behavioral reactions. Psychophysiology, 30(2), 261-‐273. Larsen, J., & Norris, J. (2009). A Facial Electromyographic Investigation of Affective Contrast. Psychophysiology, 46(4), 831-‐842. Micu, A., & Plummer, J. (2010). Measurable Emotions: How Television Ads Really Work. Journal of Advertising Research, 50(2), 137-‐153. Nancarrow, C., Wright, L., & Brace, I. (1998). Gaining competitive advantage from packaging and labelling in marketing communications. British Food Journal, 100(2), 110-‐118. Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-‐259. Öhman, A., Flykt, A., & Esteves, F. (2001). Emotion drives attention: detecting the snake in the grass. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(3), 466-‐478. 6
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