Biscuits, chocolate and confectionery packaging: the experience of touching the packaging

Consumers like to touch certain products before buying, studies have shown since the eighties (Holbrook, 1983; cf. Heslin & Alper, 1983). Touch can have a dramatic impact on purchasing decisions, as it can add emotional value to the experience, since skin is directly related to emotional responses. Consequently, marketers of chocolate, biscuits and confectionery need to come up with creative packaging that evokes emotion through touching.

An Understated But Valuable Metric

As important as human touch is to marketing, it's a topic you may not have heard or read about much about until recently. It's simply an over-looked topic, despite how much it can help sell a product. Research from the fields of marketing, psychology and cognitive neuroscience points to compelling data that the feel of a product is a key determination in how consumers evaluate certain items.

In recent years as marketers have become more aware of consumer studies related to product feel, "tactile branding," a subset of multi-sensory branding, is starting to gain interest. Tactile relates to the sense of touch. In other words, companies are exploring the possibilities of multi-sensory brand experiences and how they relate to feelings that shape a brand's image. The more marketers learn about the connection between touch and emotion, the more they can influence manufacturers to design packages a certain way.

Ironically, studies have shown since the 1960s that touch is what humans rely on the most for confirming whether or not they feel comfortable about something (Academic research by Rock and Victor, 1964; Spence & Gallace, 2008). Yet marketers are only starting to take notice to how people value items based on touch.

Age of Virtual Touch

So how can manufacturers of chocolate, biscuits and confectionery benefit from knowledge about touch in an era in which so many purchasing decisions are made online? It mostly means that businesses need to think more about the multi-sensory product experience in packaging designs for certain products.

It opens the door to questions about virtual haptic reality devices and how soon they will be able to deliver tactile experiences to internet users. While there has been some progress in this area, there is still plenty of room to grow for software to provide tactile experiences to consumers in the home, especially when it comes to evaluating textures. At the moment it appears that in-store shopping is still the best opportunity to connect with consumers through sensory branding.

The most essential aspects of experiential branding are pack, feel and shape (Howes, 2005). Part of the challenge for a food company is to make the package appeal to the sense of taste and the sense of touch at the same time. One of the barriers that slows down this development, however, is that scientists have yet to develop a comprehensive lexicon relating to touch and how it associates with emotion and decision-making. It's easier to label, quantify and understand visual sensations. It may take quite a bit more psychological research to determine which shapes correspond with certain emotions caused by touch.

One way to provide an in-store touching experience is to create a design that invites consumers to hold the product in their hands. Most marketers are already aware that providing this opportunity helps sales. Another way is to create a design that triggers that same emotion holding the package as the emotion of what the product itself generates.

The Future of Sensory Branding

Even though much more research is needed to develop sensory branding for chocolate, biscuits and confectionery, some milestones may already point to future solutions. Kansei Engineering, for example, is a system that was developed in the 1970s in which aspects of product development can be translated into feelings and emotions that relate to design considerations (Nagamachi, 1989, 1995). The Kansei approach, however, does not deal with how senses interact.

As companies learn more about tactile marketing, they may take age into account since the more one ages, the more their sense of touch declines. This fact implies that different shaped packages may be more effective for targeting certain demographics.

Conclusion

Consumers are more likely to buy products they get to touch first. Only in recent years have marketers become curious about multi-sensory branding that includes appeal to touch. This growing knowledge has many steps to climb before becoming engrained in marketing strategies, since it's still very difficult to quantify touch and convert its sensations to data. Touch marketing may not happen overnight, but the seeds have been planted for marketers to track in the coming years. Desjardin has been producing packaging for Chocolates , Biscuits and Confectionery packaging for more than 100 years. The company's experts are at your service to help you find the right packaging to support your products' success.