Does your product feature the large image of a character’s face on it? The way this face looks may affect your sales and chances of getting shoppers to take your product seriously—especially if the target audience happens to be young.
A team of researchers from the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab seem to think so, at least, according to a report they recently released. The study examined the effects that can be noticed from 65 different cereal package designs.
The goal of these cereals that prominently featured the faces of cartoon characters or celebrity spokespeople seems to have been to make “eye contact” between the cereal box and the shopper. But this means scaling the images on the boxes slightly depending on the audience and the size of the cereal. Childrens’ cereals mascots like Cap’n Crunch were found to be looking down, because that had a greater chance of establishing eye contact with the younger and more diminutive consumer.
As a result, Katharine Baildon notes that cereal companies might want to remember this strategy in their own marketing efforts.
“Creating spokes-characters who make eye contact with a product’s target audience (child or adult) is a package design that can be used as an advertising tool that influences people to buy and develop brand loyalty,” she writes.
BakeryAndSnacks.com recently reported that the market for common ingredients that go into breakfast cereals, including mainstays like barley and corn, might be worth more than $755 million five years from now. If this is true, cereal makers might specifically have the opportunity to make more food labels for their products, and these could include faces that are properly depicted and printed without streaks, blemishes or lines. This requires label printers with the durability to create color packaging that lasts.
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