This new book provides readers with a thoughtful packaging primer that covers the challenges of designing packaging for a competitive market. The book addresses all aspects of the creative process, including ...
By Ron Romanik
In typical focus group settings, participants want to help you. They want to sound smart. They will give you answers when they don't know the answer, and almost always on the most superficial aspects of your product. Participants will want to try and "fix" your product. And if they're seeing multiple design options, they are going to choose their favorite. And they're going to call it "the winner."
No matter what the product, package, or setting, there's always going to be a chosen winner. However, knowing what focus groups choose as a winner does not always help the design process. The problem with focus groups, and many kinds of research, is that they are unable to capture the essence of the first impression.
Taking another tack
Not to downplay the importance of focus groups for research, but perhaps they are not always the best form of research when it comes to package design. Considering this, the William Fox Munroe design firm created a research process that used richer diagnostics, eliminated proactive consumer analysis, and measured design only against predetermined marketing objectives.
Called Design Check™, the process is an online research tool that combines monadic methods with quantitative research. Monadic meaning each respondent sees only one of the designs being tested. This forces research subjects to evaluate one particular design, quickly, without being influenced by how other designs look.
William Fox Munroe applied its Design Check research tool to one package, the Carpet & Room Odor Eliminator, in the 2007 Package Design Makeover Challenge. Double-opt-in respondents were sent an email solicitation asking them to take a brief survey and earn a chance to win a prize in a sweepstakes. If interested, the respondents clicked on a link that transported them to the survey site where they were asked demographic information on gender, age, and residency.
The population under study consisted of a total of 1,000 respondents. 500 viewed the old design, and 500 viewed the new one. Questions were randomly rotated to prevent order bias. With this sample size, the data has a 4% margin of error.
Respondents were asked to view one design being tested. After 10 seconds, the design disappeared and the respondents were asked to rank the image they had just seen against a set of predetermined measurements that included product attributes, emotional responses, and behavioral responses.
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