What Can Neuromarketing Tell Us about Food Packaging?

Packaging is a powerful tool for brands, which can not only catch consumers' attention but also influence their purchase decisions. The application of neuromarketing techniques to the study of food packaging has recently gained considerable popularity both in academia and practice, but there are still some concerns about the methods and metrics commercially offered and the interpretation of their findings. This represents the motivation of this investigation, whose objective is twofold: (1) to analyze the methodologies and measurements commonly used in neuromarketing commercial research on packaging, and (2) to examine the extent to which the results of food packaging studies applying neuromarketing techniques can be reproduced under similar methodologies. Obtained results shed light on the application of neuromarketing techniques in the evaluation of food packaging and reveal that neuromarketing and declarative methodologies are complementary, and its combination may strengthen the studies' results. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of having a framework that improves the validity and reliability of neuromarketing studies to eradicate mistrust toward the discipline and provide brands with valuable insights into food packing design.

Revealing Unconscious Consumer Reactions to Advertisements That Include Visual Metaphors. A Neurophysiological Experiment.

The main challenge of advertising is to catch consumers' attention and evoke in them positive attitudes to consequently achieve product preference and higher purchase intentions. In modern advertising, visual metaphors are widely used due to their effects such as improving advertising recall, enhancing persuasiveness, and generating consumers' positive attitudes. Previous research has pointed out the existence of an "inverted U-curve" that describes a positive relationship between the conceptual complexity of metaphors and consumers' positive reactions to them, which ends where complexity outweighs comprehension. Despite the dominance of visual metaphors in modern advertising, academic research on this topic has been relatively sparse. The inverted U-curve pattern has been validated regarding ad appreciation, ad liking, and purchase intention by using declarative methods. However, at present, there is no evidence of consumers' neurophysiological responses to visual metaphors included in advertising. Given this gap, the aim of this research is to assess consumer neurophysiological responses to print advertisements that include visual metaphors, using neuroscience-based techniques. Forty-three participants (22W-21M) were exposed to 28 stimuli according to three levels of visual complexity, while their reactions were recorded with an electroencephalogram (EEG), eye tracking (ET), and galvanic skin response (GSR). The results indicated that, regardless of metaphor type, ads with metaphors evoke more positive reactions than non-metaphor ads. EEG results revealed a positive relationship between cognitive load and conceptual complexity that is not mediated by comprehension. This suggests that the cognitive load index could be a suitable indicator of complexity, as it reflects the amount of cognitive resources needed to process stimuli. ET results showed significant differences in the time dedicated to exploring the ads; however, comprehension doesn't mediate this relationship. Moreover, no cognitive load was detected from GSR. ET and GSR results suggest that neither methodology is a suitable measure of cognitive load in the case of visual metaphors. Instead, it seems that they are more related to the attention and/or emotion devoted to the stimuli. Our empirical analysis reveals the importance of using neurophysiological measures to analyze the appropriate use of visual metaphors and to find out how to maximize their impact on advertising effectiveness.

Do isolated packaging variables influence consumers' attention and preferences?

Developments in neuroscience have provided the opportunity to know unconscious consumer reactions and acknowledge direct measures of cognitive constructs like attention. Given the ever-increasing concern over packaging's contribution to creating a positive first impression, the current research seeks to examine consumers' attention and declarative preferences regarding the three main different packaging attributes as isolated variables: images, texts and colours. The experiment exposed participants (N = 40) to 63 stimuli, which were based on modifications of the three main packaging attributes of three products of three different food categories. This study used electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye-tracking (ET) to measure attention, and a declarative test was employed to examine preference. First, the results presented herein show that the presence of visual elements, either images or texts on packages, increased the participants' level of attention. Second, the results reveal that colour modifications do not have a significant effect on participants' neurophysiological attention levels. Third, the results demonstrated that the neurophysiological effects among the participants do not necessarily coincide with their subjective evaluations of preference. Hence, this study increases awareness of the relevance of combining traditional market research tools that rely on explicit consumer responses with neuroscientific techniques. These findings indicate, first of all, that more research is needed to ascertain the extent to which consumers' neurophysiological outcomes correspond to their declarative preferences and second, that neurophysiological methods should be given more attention in research.