Do you have any insights on success levers or best practices for product re-stages?

It is highly likely that a brand that is not growing will be a candidate for re-staging, therefore it is extremely important to identify why the brand is not growing or is declining.

Consider whether the issue is a loss of price competitiveness, weak distribution or loss of prime shelf space to store brands in a stagnant category. Does the re-staging fix the biggest weakness?

Ensure the re-staging is based on consumer information that indicates they see the brand as needing a re-stage (rather than the marketing team or senior management thinking it needs a re-stage).

Re-staging or re-positioning will likely involve pack changes, we recommend marketers need to fully understand what Distinctive Assets are key to continued consumer recognition of the brand. Remember that most buyers of your brand are quite infrequent – and indeed a many might only purchase once a year or even less.

See report: Ultra-lights – The Unbearable Lightness of Buying

This means a long time can pass between brand purchases, and if the pack has changed due to a re-stage, consumers may not recognise the brand and purchase something else in their repertoire. Make sure consumers can easily identify the brand correctly if there are appreciable changes to the pack.

Re-staging may be carried out to enable the brand to take a different price position (usually, trying to take it from low-mid price point to a more premium level). Remember this process does take time. The case of Japanese and Korean car brands that have moved from budget to mid-price points took more than a decade, and importantly, substantial improvements in the physical product — so re-staging based on cosmetic changes alone is unlikely to work.

The success of re-staging will undoubtedly need channel partner acceptance so involve retailer partners early on and benefit from their feedback.

Understand the brand’s current perceptions in the market (brand attributes, controlling for prototypically) and have clear goals beforehand of what success should look like in terms of altered perceptions. Note, it is much harder to appreciably change brand perceptions than is commonly believed.

J.D.
21 January 2025

We are launching a limited edition pack with another brand, how do you suggest we design our packaging? Should our brand feature theirs more? For further context they are coming into our category and will be more a new flavour, but will have its own range for a limited time.

Quite simply your brand should feature prominently on the limited-edition packaging as its your category not theirs. But here’s why you must aim to keep your brand the star:

• Reinforce Mental Availability: Consistent use of your brand’s Distinctive Assets: such as logo, colours, and fonts, ensures consumers can easily identify your product in the future. Even in a collaboration, your brand must feature as you do not want to run the risk of confusing consumers or adding more mental structures. Thus, creating competition with yourself in memory.
• Leverage Brand Recognition: If your brand is more well-known, emphasising it will likely boost the product’s appeal. If the partner brand is stronger in certain markets, their logo can still be prominent, but not at the expense of your key assets. Remember they are coming into your category, and you would like anyone who trials the product to possible also buy your products once this limited edition is gone. Consumers cannot do this if they think it’s the partner brands product.
• Remember Distinctiveness Over Differentiation: Recognisable branding helps your product stand out on shelves. Ensure the packaging aligns with your existing range, making the limited edition feel like a natural extension rather than an entirely new product.
• Physical Availability Considerations: Retailers and consumers need to quickly identify your brand. Keeping your brand elements front and centre ensures continuity and avoids confusion at the point of sale. If you would like to feature the partner brand more on the display (to keep the retailer or partner brand happy) you can do this, but ensure what consumers buy and take home your brand is the feature.

With dual branding we often find only one brands wins, so design the packaging so that your brand is the focal point, while still giving adequate but secondary visibility to the partner brand.

W.C
12 November 2024

What was the institutes position on in vitro testing of marketing mix elements. Packaging, Advertising, Pricing etc. are there any great new digital, artificial intelligence methods to gauge elasticities we should now about?

We are big fans of controlled experiments. Digital environments do allow for more testing (e.g. within single online retailers for pricing or pack and in digital media platforms for copy or media tests.

But not all experiments are equal. Ideal to have independent measurement. Multiple tests encouraged e.g. across retailers, media, time etc. Some issues in likes of social where you may be wanting to test one element e.g. copy or a target audience but the algorithms change and it alters factors that you think are controlled across your test cells. (There is a recent reading on this.. not sure of authors).

AI has some amazing applications especially related to efficiency. Not sure it is the tool that is going to deliver in this space where you really want the in-market response to the differences you are testing.

Learnings are very useful from controlled tests. Elasticities may not be the priority measure to focus on (potentially impacted by other factors unrelated to the test).

M.N, R.K, J.D & W.C

22 November 2024

How do you suggest we perform packaging redesign research?

Packaging research involves understanding consumer behaviour and the role of distinctive brand assets (branding) to influence buying decisions. Contrary to popular case studies you are not likely to increase sales by 200% by redesigning packaging. Packaging primarily reaches your current buyers, those who do not buy you will not be looking for your packaging.

Here’s how I would approach a packaging redesign study:

1. Clearly Define the Objective

Understand what you aim to achieve with the research:

• Are you testing the effectiveness of current packaging?
• Are you introducing new design?
• Are you trying to identify key distinctive assets for your brand?
• Are you trying to make your packaging more relevant for a group of consumers?

2. Leverage Distinctive Assets

It is very important to understand the importance of distinctive assets to make your brand easily recognisable to those who buy your brand. Key steps:

• Audit Existing Assets: Assess elements like logos, colours, shapes, typography, and imagery.
• Test Fame: Understand the Fame of packaging assets to understand how well these assets are not only identified and linked to the brand.
• Understand Uniqueness: Do certain assets have mental competition with other brands. Additional cues create competition, minimise the use of these assets on packaging where possible.
• Enhance Salience: Ensure these elements stand out on the shelf or screen.

3. Focus on Memory Structures

Ehrenberg-Bass key principles stress the role of mental and physical availability. For packaging:

• Mental Availability: Does your packaging evoke associations linked to the category or specific needs (e.g., eco-friendly, luxury)?
• Physical Availability: Ensure the packaging size, format, and visibility align with shopping environments.

4. Conduct Quantitative Research

• Perform Distinctive Asset Research to measure and benchmark asset strength
• Measure desired brand associations between old vs new packaging if needed.
• Use virtual store shelfs to test new vs old packaging, competitors must be included. Tip: Do not tell consumers a pack has changed, just ask them to buy the brand they normally would. Ideally give them a scenario. A/B testing of old vs new packaging in this way will help to determine the impact of the new packaging design.

6. Monitor and Iterate

• Use market sales data to track the impact of packaging changes on brand performance.
• Conduct distinctive asset refresh studies to ensure continued effectiveness. This doesn’t need to be yearly it could be every 2 years as packaging. Before modifying any assets its important to test what this change will do to Fame and Uniqueness.

Research Steps to Follow:

1. Pre-Test: Test the current packaging’s distinctiveness of assets Fame and Uniqueness and the appeal amongst consumers.
2. Asset Optimisation: Refine packaging design elements to strengthen salience of key assets and recognisability. Remove elements from pack that are not needed. Classify what are branding devices, messaging devices and creative devices in your packaging design.
3. Shelf Testing: Place the packaging in competitive scenarios to measure.
4. Post-Launch Tracking: Measure sales, and customer feedback after rollout.

W.C

22 November 2024

What is an example of a good limited-edition packaging design/campaign?

Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign is a good example. In this campaign, Coca-Cola altered the messaging on their packaging by replacing their logo with popular names. Despite this change, the brand retained its iconic structural and branding elements—such as the bottle shape, label colour, and font style—which have high Fame and Uniqueness (assets in the Use or Lose quadrant). These consistent Distinctive Assets ensured that consumers could still easily recognise the product as Coca-Cola, demonstrating how powerful and recognisable brand elements can maintain brand identity even when the brand name is not present.

It’s important to note that not all brands are like Coke and have varying strength of Distinctive Assets, and what works for one brand may not work for another. For example, a new or lesser-known brand might not have the same level of consumer recognition as Coca-Cola, so altering key brand elements could risk losing brand identity. This is why it’s vital to conduct thorough testing beforehand to assess the strength and effectiveness of your brand’s Distinctive Assets (add link to our service). Understanding which assets have high Fame and Uniqueness allows brands to make informed decisions about which elements can be safely modified and which should remain consistent to maintain strong consumer recognition.

How important is it to maintain the consistency from the packaging of consumer products to the B2B products? It’s been argued that our B2B customers want something that looks different than what can be found at Target or Walmart – specific to colour of the packaging. But wouldn’t the Distinctive Asset that is being used – colour in this case, to identify the flavour – be needed for recognition regardless of what shelf it’s on?

If they are all linked to the same brand name, your B2B products need to look like they come from the same brand portfolio as your B2C products – that is to share a visual identity.  If you don’t want to share brand identity then use a different name, otherwise you will just cause confusion and potentially dilute the strength of your strongest assets.

But that doesn’t mean the B2B pack has to look identical (just as say the sensitive laundry powder looks different from the other members of the portfolio), but choose something that is not a Distinctive Asset for the brand to vary to signal B2B.

J.R
16 May 2024

When you advise to check that the redesign does not reduce Fame and Uniqueness of shopping assets, how would we test Fame in our research?

The first step is to understand what your shopping assets are? For example doing a Distinctive Asset study and determining the Fame and mental competitors of each of these assets that are used on packaging. Next is to only change what consumers do not use to shop for the brand (if required). This approach helps maintain Fame, causing less confusion. Or, if you are launching a limited edition, allows you to understand what represents the brand.

Fame is a measure of how many people know the brand out of the total market. So it really depends how you want to test this. There are numerous way to test the design to measure Fame.

One way is using an unprompted approach (like we test assets). I would take off the logo from the pack and ask how many people know what brand your concepts are linked to. This is the most simple way, but after understanding what your shopping assets are it will become clear what concept might perform better. In all testing always include the old packaging that is being replaced to benchmark against.

W.C.
2 April 2024

Is eye-tracking our packaging design concepts worth the investment?

Eye-tracking has its place to help determine what stands out. However, the drawbacks of using eye-tracking in packaging design involve shifting focus from creative excellence to algorithmic optimisation. For example, if you aim to make a logo more prominent, the tendency might be to enlarge it and remove other elements, potentially overlooking the overall design integrity.

Our case study analysis of packaging redesigns (and research used) reveals that excessive emphasis on packaging in isolation doesn’t guarantee success.

When testing packaging, it’s crucial to replicate the consumer’s purchase experience as closely as possible, whether online or in-store. Additionally, avoid signalling that changes have been made; instead, ask participants which brand they would choose from the shelf and present them with different designs.

The most effective approach we’ve discovered involves understanding the brand’s identity and identifying its Distinctive Assets. Then, when working with designers, please show them your existing packaging and strive to maintain a consistent holistic design.

W.C.
6 March 2024

How does featuring Disney characters on our products/packs/ads impact Mental Availability of our brands?

Some of our brands see Disney characters as critical (and distinctive) assets which they may be, but I wonder if they are doing anything to build Mental Availability or equity for our brands.

These Disney characters can be similar to celebrities in brand partnerships. Celebrities in their own right are fabulous at capturing attention because they are familiar to the audience and we have a lot of existing mental structures that can be ignited.

However, the issue from a co-presentation point of view is that because of these existing memories and all of the other elements associated with the characters (e.g., the movie they are in, other brands they have been seen with, childhood memories, etc.), they can also lead to competitive interference. In research looking at brand-celebrity advertisements, researchers have found that there was a “vampire effect”, such that people paid so much attention to the celebrity that they couldn’t recall the brand. Essentially the celebrity was sucking attention away from the brand.

To validate whether the characters are indeed Distinctive Assets (and therefore can replace the brand in your marketing communications), we would highly recommend you do some empirical testing. But Distinctive Assets testing will still only capture whether the asset is linked to other competitor brands within the same category, rather than any mental clutter outside of the category.

You can absolutely still use the Disney elements as an attention-grabbing device on your products and communications – they don’t need to be brand assets – but just make sure you are also including prominent branding throughout and highlighting the category as the context/creative. That is, make it look more like an ad for your category than an ad for a Disney movie. This will help reduce any interference.

2 January 2024
C.N.

How do I determine what messaging devices are vs. what branding devices are on my packaging?

Great question. It is important to understand that messaging and branding devices on packaging serve different purposes, but can sometimes overlap. Here’s a breakdown to help differentiate between the two. First, we strongly recommend performing Distinctive Asset research, as this will help quantify the value of your branding devices. Otherwise, you are just guessing, what represents the brand and the value of each type of branding device.

• Branding Devices (Distinctive Assets):
  Distinctive Assets encompass elements that represent the brand identity on the pack. These can include colours, characters, fonts, product images, stylised images, taglines, etc.
• Messaging Devices
  Messaging devices are elements on the pack that communicate specific information about the product. These can include product images, product information, certification or seals, claims, etc.

When examining packaging designs, consider what elements primarily provide information about the product, its features, or promotions versus what elements consistently represent and reinforce the brand’s identity.

Messaging devices can change more frequently, catering to specific campaigns or product variations, while branding devices need to remain consistent to build a strong brand identity over time. Consistency is the cornerstone of a strong brand identity. If you change elements that represent your brand, you run the risk of losing sales as you lose recognition. For more information on packaging redesigns, see Report 114: Lifting the Lid on Consumer Packaging Redesigns.

W.C.
13 December 2023