Sticking it to the package designer

By SIMON HENDERY

The stick-figure man sitting below a bottle of salad dressing on the computer screen has a blank expression.

But use the mouse to move him towards the "A Really Awful Brand" side of the screen and his face drops. Shove him towards "My Ideal" and the frown turns into a smile.

There is a growing trend towards gathering market research online and yesterday ACNielsen launched its latest research product using the internet medium.

The company's packs@work software - featuring the stickman - is a tool for assessing customer feedback to product packaging.

With 80,000 items sold in New Zealand supermarkets, and 12,000 new items introduced into the grocery market each year, researching an effective packaging look is increasingly important for manufacturers.

Travyn Rhall, ACNielsen's Pacific region managing director for customised research services, says the ability to present graphics over the internet makes it an ideal medium to develop cost-effective packaging research.

In the past companies have gone down the expensive path of developing packaging prototypes to pre-test their products.

"Marketers will often shy away from researching their new pack designs and how they stack up against their competitors, relying instead on gut feel and a straw poll of work colleagues," Rhall says.

International studies showed that 70 to 80 per cent of buying decisions were made at the point of purchase.

"When you're in there with the shopping basket, looking at the goods you're going to buy, typically it's a promotion or how the brand communicates to you via its pack that impacts on your decision to purchase," Rhall says.

As well as making the stickman smile, consumers using packs@work are asked to put different products into a shopping basket (if they would buy it), back on the shelf, into a bargain bin (if they would buy it only at a cheap price) or into a rubbish bin.

After seeing shelf views of several products, they are asked to shift different label shapes, colours and phases ("fat free, "good quality") into boxes for different manufacturers.

Rhall says that in the US, about 25 per cent of all market research is now conducted online.

In New Zealand and Australia the figure is about 5 per cent, but he expects it to grow to about 15 per cent over the next three years.