a friendly attitude toward a certain brand of coffee and yet, at the store, they buy other brands of coffee.
You may have a friendly attitude toward a billboard. That does not necessarily mean that you will be attracted by this billboard or that it will influence you to buy the product to which the billboard directs you.
The following study shows that expressed attitudes are not necessarily action-motivating. A group of about seventy business and professional men were shown a number of signs designed for an oil company together with signs of three other oil companies. They were asked which of the signs they liked best. One of the old signs received forty-six votes. An investigation later showed that of the forty-six men twenty-one did not buy any one particular oil or gas and of the remaining twenty-five only four men used the gas sold by the company whose sign they admired.
This investigation demonstrated that just because the men liked the sign did not mean that they bought the oil. The sign did not convince them that the oil it advertised was good or economical. They merely liked the sign itself as a work of art, independent of the purpose of the sign.
Another excellent demonstration of the difference between what people say and what they do or want is a test conducted with head scarves, popularly known as babushkas, in six distinctly different designs and color schemes. Eighty-five club women were asked “Which of the six kerchieves is in your opinion the most beautiful?” Sixty-six chose No. 6. Then a product identifying contest was conducted with the same group of women and the kerchieves were offered as prizes. Out of the sixty-six women only nine wanted the No. 6 design for which they had voted only about one hour before. Obviously, what the women said was the most beautiful and what they actually wanted differed greatly.
It is not difficult to see that when the women were asked for an opinion of the scarves, they did not associate the scarves as part of their wardrobes but merely as abstract entities, as mere designs. When the scarves were offered as prizes and brought about a possibility of possession of the article, the scarf was looked at by each woman in relation to her wardrobe and her complexion. The first expressed attitude was not action-motivating on the part of the fifty-seven women out of the sixty-six. Only when choice had real personal meaning to them did the club women express a true choice.
Determining the Character of a Design
What management wants in a package design is an effective marketing tool and this cannot be achieved by having artists create a half-dozen or more comprehensive designs and then making a choice of one out of the group. Such procedure, although commonly practiced, is worthless and contributes to numerous marketing failures.
Even if we should find out which of a half-dozen designs is the best marketing medium, we still do not know how effective a selling medium the best design of the six really is. We know only that it may be better than any of the other five designs. We do not know how poor each of the other designs is, nor do we know what makes one design better than the other, nor whether the best design can be improved and made a still more effective marketing medium.
When a scientist finds an unknown animal in the jungle, his objective is to learn to which species it belongs. He examines the anatomy, the skull, mouth structure; he studies the food and mating habits. From this information he can classify the animal. We must use a similar scientific approach if marketing research is to be a reliable tool.
A package design or a magazine ad generally consists of a rectangular three-dimensional shape, a geometric or realistic two dimensional image on the front of the package, type faces, pattern and color. Each of these produces a distinct unconscious effect. The diversity of elements often produces conflicting sensations as for example the relative effects produced by soft color and a hard image or harsh color and soft delicate line.
In order to be able to determine whether a design as a whole will have maximum effectiveness as a marketing medium, we must first measure the character of each individual element and then determine the inter-relationship of all the components. Obviously if we determine the nature of each of the elements of a package design or advertising page, we can then proceed to adopt the favorable ones and improve or eliminate the poor ones.
Determining Image Effectiveness
When the effectiveness of geometric figures or abstract images, such as ovals, triangles, rectangles, scrolls, etc. were tested, we found that some of the images had greater acceptance than others. For example, in comparison with a triangle, circle and rectangle, the oval had a much greater preference rating.
The tests also showed that a shape or image does not necessarily have great retention power just because it has a high preference or acceptance. For example, although the triangle was both consciously and unconsciously often rejected in favor of the oval, whereas the oval was both consciously and unconsciously widely accepted, the triangle nevertheless remained in the memory with a greater number of people than the oval. In other words, the triangle had a higher retention rating than the oval, although its preference rating was not nearly as high as that of the oval. Rounding the angles of the triangle produced greatly increased acceptance among women and some increased acceptance among men. Increased roundness raised the preference rating further.
We found that the simpler the image, the higher the preference as well as the retention rating. A multi-angled snowflake drawing had both low preference and retention ratings. We also learned that ovals and triangles had among the highest preference and retention ratings.
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