Opening Lines: Only the Strong Survive
The theory of evolution meets package design.
by Jennifer Kwok, EditorHow can a package designer confidently determine which package designs will most appeal to the target consumer? Advice from marketing teams helps. Consumer research, such as focus groups, is another way to judge customer appeal. Now, technology from Affinnova, a company that recently landed on my radar, offers a way to gauge consumers’ preferences of a wide range of designs early in the design process.
Affinnova’s technology is called IDDEA. It is an online system that takes a “survival of the fittest” approach to refining package designs. Here’s how the system works. Designers create variations of a package’s different design elements, such as logo, logo placement, package color, and package shape. In a nutshell, IDDEA takes these elements and churns out all possible combinations, from thousands to millions, of package designs. Through a series of steps, as a respondent is asked which designs he or she likes best, the system—in real time—will eliminate the design elements the respondent didn’t like—and then create a new range of alternate package designs based only on the elements that he or she did like. Through process of elimination, IDDEA determines, in a very comprehensive fashion, which package design a respondent favors most.
One of IDDEA’s biggest benefits is that it makes it possible for reviewers to consider a much broader range of design alternatives—based on design elements they truly prefer. A more conventional type of package review process typically requires designers and executives to look at sketches and narrow down only their top choices to present to reviewers, says Steve Lamoureux, Affinnova’s chief innovation officer. These designers and executives make decisions based on their own judgment and understanding of the marketplace—or their subjective interpretations of design direction from marketing teams, says Lamoureux, who calls this “the best-guess approach.” IDDEA, he says, ensures that viable options aren’t killed too early in the game.
As mentioned, IDDEA can be employed much earlier in the package design process. For instance, if a company has not yet been able to narrow down which elements are best, it can use IDDEA, early in the design stage, to present the wide range of choices to reviewers. This can allow companies to pinpoint early in the process the strong contenders so designers don’t waste their time working with elements that in the end, the consumer won’t like. Designers can determine consumer preferences much earlier.
Many companies like to get up close and personal with consumers. For a CPC Packaging article two years ago, Krista Schwartz, Procter & Gamble’s global design manager, described how P&G sends researchers to consumers’ homes to study their behavior. “We lived with the consumer for months,” she said. “We shopped with her at the mall. We visited her home. We found out what she loved and hated—and not just [in terms of] shampoo. [We learned] about her life and what she values.”
Although IDDEA shows respondents how package designs look, without being able to hold a package, consumers cannot offer feedback about a package’s weight, texture, or function. Even so, brands could find IDDEA a very useful tool in their design process. After all, P&G has used IDDEA. So have Unilever, Playtex, and Colgate.