Online tool makes plumbing a package’s appeal to consumers easier

By Constantine von Hoffman

In consumer goods, it’s all about the package. And on a crowded retail shelf, catching the eye of the consumer is crucial, says Michael Steve, a senior research manager for Del Monte Foods. "We’re doing a package redesign and we needed to make sure that our package stands out on the shelf and that it’s communicating the right attributes."

To measure what makes us look, companies long have used focus groups, eye-tracking technology, tachistoscopes or comparative analyses. But Steve, being short on time and money, turned instead to Shelf Impact, a new online tool from Harris Interactive.

Using a timed-exposure technique, Shelf Impact emulates tachistoscopes—devices that control the length of time respondents view an image. While t-scopes and eye-tracking represent a major improvement over previous methodologies, they still have real limitations, says Peter Gold, vice president for consumer packaged goods at Harris Interactive. Both require specialized equipment and have to be used at a testing facility, not in a store or at a consumer’s home, limiting the geographic diversity of the test audience.

"By their very nature, t-scopes and eye-tracking must be done in a central location," says Gold.

Shelf Impact removes that barrier, while also putting a product in a competitive context. This makes it more comprehensive than a focus group or comparative analysis, says Gold.

With Shelf Impact, consumers first view the test product on their home computer, then are shown a rapidly displayed image of it in a shelf setting. Next up is a response grid that resembles the shelf-set in terms of size, shape and location on the screen. Subjects indicate where they saw the test product by clicking a button. This allows the tool to measure package findability, impact and imagery. Del Monte was most impressed by the findability feature.

"We’ve done a lot of online package testing in the past, but no one’s been able to really give a shelf-impact read," says Steve. He says that while other online testing can show a package and ask what people recall about it, Shelf Impact’s timed exposures make this a more easily measured process. "It does a better job of laying a product within a competitive environment and getting people’s recall of your specific product."

Del Monte opted for Shelf Impact’s online method for two reasons, according to Steve. The first was cost: "The methodology itself saved us a lot of money," he says. The second was timing: "We were able to get it done in about half the time."

Neither Steve nor Gold would discuss specific pricing for Shelf Impact, although both estimated its cost to be half that of other methods such as eye-tracking or t-scopes. As a result, "it enables companies that are squandering their research budgets with expensive eye-tracking techniques to double the number of package studies they can conduct each year," says Gold.

Harris has combined multiple ways of gauging package impact in one product, says Marilyn Henninger, president of ProAct, a trend forecasting firm. "They’ve done a really good job of integrating measures of all the different aspects of what you have to do to be successful on the shelf," she says.

Copyright © 2005 CXO Media Inc.