Article published by Enrique Martínez-Barona Barriga in Diario de Avisos on 06/22/14.
At the beginning of the century we are facing a change in consumer behavior whereby consumers opt for products focused on intangible aspects such as emotions, experiences or fantasies. Purchasing behavior is increasingly related to the purchasing situation, with a shift in focus from product properties to experiences at the point of purchase.
Shopping situations are characterized by the existence of a large number of visual stimuli, few of which will leave a trace in memory, and purchase decisions that are far from being completely conscious. Current supermarkets have, for each product category, a large number of products from different brands, with very similar characteristics to each other. We are therefore faced with many products, a lot of information and a consumer with limited cognitive capacity.
It is estimated that more than 70% of purchasing decisions for mass consumption products are made in stores, 85% buy without having taken any alternative product in their hands and 90% make the purchase after simply visually examining the front of the packaging. In short, what you see is what you choose.
Our purchasing decisions are generally very fast and are made automatically, due to pure cognitive economy. We make little effort in tasks such as comparing prices or reading product features, and we generally make our decisions in just a few seconds. Our brain takes shortcuts and uses visual cues to make quick and effective decisions. Consumers find objects attractive if they are easy to perceive and understand. Products with a characteristic shape and high contrast can attract consumers' initial visual attention.
The ability of a product to attract the visual attention of buyers has a great influence on the decisions they make (products that are not seen are not bought). Eye-tracking or monitoring of eye movements is a reliable way to measure the attention paid to objects such as products on a shelf. By analyzing buyers' eye movements it is possible to obtain knowledge about their visual attention span, which in turn is related to their purchasing considerations.
Consumer behavior at the point of purchase is influenced both by factors based on memory (habits, previous experiences, brand communications, recommendations from other consumers, etc.) and by purely physical factors of the products and their presentations. The visibility of the packaging is affected by various factors such as shape, color, contrast, logo, typography, etc.
The challenge that brands face is to stand out in a crowded shelf of similar products and competing brands that share the same space and where each product tries to attract the attention of consumers. Eye-tracking data is especially useful in revealing a packaging's ability to stand out on the shelf. Eye-tracking is a technique for measuring visual attention. Visual attention refers to where the eyes are directed. According to the eye-mind hypothesis, there is an association between the direction of gaze and attentional focus: people attend to what they fixate on, so eye movements and fixations are good indicators of the allocation of attention.
There are more than 10 types of eye movements, the most important of which are saccades and fixations. Fixations are the moments in which the eyes stop to focus while the movements between those fixations are called saccades. The saccades are very fast, their duration is between 20 and 40 ms. During this period the eyes do not send visual information to the brain. The human eye has a visual field of about 200 degrees, but the largest number of light-sensitive cells in the retina are found in the fovea, which is the only point where we can get a sharp, colorful image of the world around us. Our peripheral vision is very poor and is only good at detecting movements and contrasts.
Inferences can be made about human behavior from eye movements, especially fixations, since we know that we can only see an object clearly when we fixate on it or are very close to it. Eye-tracking systems record these movements and the location of foveal vision when the eyes fixate. The duration of the fixations can tell us how easy it is to find a specific package on the shelf; The smaller the number of fixations, the more efficient the search process.
Research through eye-tracking is therefore presented as a key tool in the development of packaging design as a strategic marketing instrument. In this field of development of the latest technology in the field of marketing, a Tenerife company, Servicios Avanzados de Opinión, in collaboration with researchers from the Neurocog Project of the University of La Laguna, has carried out various market research using the eye-tracking methodology.
