00:00:00.040 — 00:00:55.240 · Jordan Buckner
Packaging redesigns are supposed to make a brand more relevant, more distinctive, and ultimately more successful on shelf. But usually even the beautifully designed new patch package can send sales in the opposite direction, or at least with no notable increase. And why does it happen, really? Because shoppers don't experience packaging the way a designer or a brand team often does.

They're often moving quickly, relying on memory familiar visual cues to find the products that they know and trust. So changing the wrong cue and your brand can suddenly become harder to recognize and maybe look like something else. So today, I'm invited on Siggy Hill. Who's head of consumer insights and testing at Smash brand.

And we're going to dive into the neuroscience behind shopper recognition, why some famous packaging designs may have failed so dramatically, and how brands can determine what they can safely change without losing the recognition they spent years building. Ziggy, welcome to the show today.


00:00:55.240 — 00:00:56.560 · Sigi Hale
Thank you. Thank you for having me.


00:00:56.560 — 00:01:10.290 · Jordan Buckner
So let's start with what's happening inside the shopper's brain, right? When someone is walking down an aisle looking for a product maybe they already know or purchase, how are they taking any kind of actually evaluating or making that decision of what to buy?


00:01:10.330 — 00:05:11.350 · Sigi Hale
Yeah, that's a that's a broad question. There's a lot of things going on under the hood there. And I think to really effectively address this question, um, for better or worse, we kind of have to help people, um, understand the model of how this consumer decision making psychology is happening and what's the key dimension by which we run into trouble with regards to changing things and upsetting our consumer base?

So the key thing coming out of the gate is to understand that people make this different types of decisions when they're walking that aisle. They're not all the same. And a simple way to think about it is that people make decisions in as thought. They put it this way. Imagine a person. I'll give you an example.

Imagine a person if you discover they have lactose intolerance, for instance, and they're going to enter a new category, they're going to say, well, maybe I'll stop drinking milk, or maybe I'll start looking at different nondairy alternatives on shelf. Right. And so they're kind of entering into a new domain of experience.

They're not committed yet. They're thinking, you know, maybe I'll do this, or maybe I'll just stop altogether. So they would be in a decision making state the kind of decision they're making. We could call trial. And that's a trial decision. And that's a very unique kind of decision. It's a low cost decision.

The stakes are low. They're not committing, you know, wholeheartedly to anything they're saying, oh, I'll just give this a shot. Their identity is not attached. It's just a very lightweight kind of engagement. And the thing that a pack needs to accomplish at that point is really capturing their attention and motivating some interest, being interesting enough to try.

Right. That's it. And so a person might be perusing aisles under that kind of psychological state with that kind of a decision happening. And they're looking for things that catch their eye and motivate some interest and package designs that are very good at doing that and oriented towards that kind of impact on a consumer are going to catch that attention, and they're going to get picked up a lot and give a lot of tries over time.

You can imagine this person, um, starts to develop some okay, I'm starting to get really interested in this category. I'm finding some things that I like, and I'm actually noticing some meaningful differences between these different products. Um, as that begins to happen, they start to think in a more committed way.

Hmm. I'm going to become a consumer of nondairy, you know, milk alternatives. And when that happens, um, there's decision psychology totally changes. Now, we can think of them in a state that we might call adoption. Right? They're no longer just kind of casually trying things. They're saying, I want to figure this out.

Um, because at the end of the day, making decisions is actually very punitive to human psychology. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of energy. Most of the stuff that's driving those decisions is happening subconsciously. So it's very confusing why we like things and we don't like things. And so we're always we want to make our decisions as efficiently as possible and to be able to kind of get through those arduous aspects of trying to resolve a problem like this.

Like, now I'm committed to the category. I want to become a consumer of this thing, and I've got to figure out which one is the right product for me. And so a much deeper kind of decision making begins to ensue. Again, I think of it as adoption. Right. And the really trying to figure out which one of these is right for me, which one of them best aligns with my my life and lifestyle, which one fits with the things that matter to me as a consumer of this product?

And I'm going to carry forward some of those things that I learned in trial. I'm going to be evaluating now the products in a much deeper way to kind of not just get, um, not just figure out what's better writ large, but really what's better for me and what's happening now is I'm starting to map my identity.

A sense of things that are right for me, relevant for me, and that makes sense in how I'm making this decision. I'm starting to map those kinds of things onto the different choice options that I have in the category space.


00:05:11.350 — 00:05:46.390 · Jordan Buckner
I think that's really powerful. It's a sense of like the product, almost like mirrors my values, and you're looking for something that reflects back how. Let's break that down a little bit to the actual packaging themselves itself. Where's the balance between the visual elements, colors, typography, graphics on the packaging and the communication hierarchy?

What you're calling the product, the naming, the, the size of the font, what's readable from, you know, six feet away how you can that that kind of tangible element of packaging align with these steps of trial and adoption?


00:05:46.430 — 00:08:06.430 · Sigi Hale
Absolutely. So in trial, you've got very limited time to engage with the consumer because they're just making quick, impulsive decisions. Instinct. You know, that's all that like system one stuff. You know, that fast thinking stuff is happening and so. Packs have to be very conscientious of cultivating engagement in trial with communicating things that are catchy, that are motivating lots of visual energy and do it quickly with immediate impact.

Um, and there's all different kinds of psychology that go into that in terms of the kinds of information that are best suited for those kinds of fast automatic processing. So there are parts of the pack where attention is biased to go to first and fastest. Um, like the upper left component of a pack, for instance, there's different styles of reading, right?

Like you can read, there's like there's things called whole word reading or phonetic reading, right? And when you read things whole word, you're treating the verbal information like an object. It is processed very, very quickly. So you see something that you've seen, you know, thousands and thousands of times.

Your brain recognizes it without sounding it out. So even though you're reading, it's a little bit like object processing, which happens really fast so you can have ideas, shouting, so to speak, large, big, blocky fonts and things that are presented in such a way that their immediate quick gets and that they're pulling on those heartstrings, driving motivation fast.

You haven't earned enough attention yet to actually have a deeper conversation that's going to slow a consumer down and have them start to more deeply go through value proposition types of things, the kind of, um, the value propositions that basically trying to convey why product A is better than product B, you've got a it's like say, you know, someone comes into a room at a gathering, they catch your they catch your eye.

So that's the first step. You have to catch the eye. Right. So that's step one. Then you have to cultivate this interest, that first impression super fast. So you're dealing in that space a fast automatic processing a lot of subconscious types of things. If the first impression goes well then you might actually sit down and have a conversation with that person.

Right. And that's where you've earned the right to kind of go deeper in the engagement. And so when they're in trial, you're working in that hyper fast space. So you've got to work fast. You've got to do things that are hyper visual, that are quick gets and that immediately resonate with that person.


00:08:06.470 — 00:08:27.150 · Jordan Buckner
Can you give an example of that object recognition? Is it something like the phrase that you use, for instance, in this example, maybe it's oat milk, something that's like very easy to understand and someone gets it versus Nondairy alternative made with oats that requires more reading. Or is it more about the just like the blocking of the font with the word?


00:08:27.190 — 00:08:56.530 · Sigi Hale
Yeah, it's very much the all of those things. So so I'll break it down a little bit deeper. Um, catching an eye catching attention is something that happens in a very predictable ways. You know, there's there's ways that you can cause a human being to orient their attention towards something. And it's agnostic to whether they like it or they don't like it.

Right. Like if you hear a loud sound. Suddenly, everyone turns their head. There are things that just cause us to look like, um. Uh.


00:08:57.570 — 00:12:06.650 · Sigi Hale
Like direct eye gaze. It's highly attention getting, like, you know, bright colors, things in motion, sharp edges, it all kinds of things that cause us to look. And that's agnostic to whether we like it or not. But when as soon as it catches our attention, it's already forming an impression on us. Right?

So even things as simple as is it rounded or is it sharp right away? That's starting to create an emotional impact, like on the way that we're experiencing it right away. We're we're processing things very quickly, and we're seeing things that might be resonant with our self-identity or not. So like even someone looks at like a, like a energy drink, right?

And they're seeing these things that look kind of scary. And the design motif overarching is very kind of like aggressive and kind of wild and that kind of thing. And there's a certain kind of psychology that that's going to immediately resonate with. And someone's going to go, yep, that's for me. I'm interested in that approach.

Psychology activate for other people, Avoided. Psychology. Activated. Right. So right off the bat, they're doing this really quick identity fit resolution. Is that something that resonates with me? And this is where, um, differences in the types of decision making apparatus that different people are bringing to the shelf start to happen.

Like there's different ways that people make sense of the world in general. And depending upon, um, the way that a certain package is branding, you're hitting on those differently. So just a real quick overview of it. We make sense of the world with our instincts, with our personal experience, with a kind of social consensus thinking and rational thought.

Right. And say with monster, with energy drinks, you get a lot of resonance with this kind of more impulsive, instinctual kind of mindset that's like excitement and, you know, all that kind of seven deadly sins, kind of instinctual cave brain stuff. Um, and so if that's if that's upstate, that's very like, um, prevalent for a given individual.

And they see that in the hits and it resonates right off positive first impression. If someone's much more a navigates the world through a kind of social lens, they're very much tied to culture and cultural kinds of dynamics and family structures and their tribe and all. All kind of sudden they see something right off the bat is showing an occasion that conveys those kinds of dynamics.

Right. And it shows the product being used in a social occasion setting and things like that. Like right away they go, like I can project and see myself in that right away. Positive first impression. If it's rational, it's gotta look rational. Like if someone's like, you know, in those kind of states. So decision psychology that the person brings to the table starts to matter at that point when that first impression is forming and all of it has to happen very quickly.

And then again, if that identity resonance pops for an individual and they're like, yep, that's for me, then we can go deeper into the package. We can move down the package to more detailed information, not just say free, but talk about this as providing 30% more than blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and get into more deep.

We can start to read prose. We can make the font different, requiring kind of a slowing down and a deeper parsing of the information. We can give more reasons to believe. We can sort of dig into the value proposition, but all of that has to be earned. And if you don't do the first two, catch the eye. Create that positive, positive first impression.

You don't get to have that sit down conversation.


00:12:06.690 — 00:12:19.650 · Jordan Buckner
I love that. You know, it reminds me of a couple conversations I've had and some of the research out there where a lot of people make their first decision based on emotional instinct and then try to justify it with logic and reason.


00:12:19.850 — 00:12:21.490 · Sigi Hale
Oh. Oh my gosh. Yeah.


00:12:21.570 — 00:12:29.130 · Jordan Buckner
Even though they think they're being logical. But the first initial response is an emotional one. And they're actually going through then like, okay, let me convince myself.


00:12:29.170 — 00:13:07.830 · Sigi Hale
Oh, God. Yeah. That's a whole other can of worms. Because for the most part, humans can't tell us why they do things or we're very bad at it. I mean, you know, someone will sit in the therapist's office for years in the therapist trying to untangle, like, why they did something right. And they're asking them, why did you do that?

And the person's like, I can't really explain it. Um, so that's kind of a misstep in market research, where as it's gotten more focused on understanding why people do things it doesn't, the field generally hasn't reconciled with the reality that people can't tell you. And so, like the application of these psychological principles and the kind of things that are going on under the hood are really critical to make progress and understanding this.


00:13:07.830 — 00:13:36.350 · Jordan Buckner
So let's get into the the redesign part of it, because I'd love to understand the core reasons that you've seen brands will come in and want to redesign their packaging. And so we can start there and then go through the process of what they're really trying to achieve and then mistakes that they make along the way.

And maybe so let's start at the beginning. Like when brands are coming to someone like smash brand, they're like, hey, I think we need to redesign our packaging. What are kind of the top 1 or 2 reasons that's causing them to think that?


00:13:36.390 — 00:16:36.070 · Sigi Hale
Well, they obviously want to do better in the marketplace. They want to improve performance. And, um, what's critical to understand is this is that you have to in order to get started on the right foot, understand what kind of brand like we were talking about these decisions. Right. And and it relates to this question, um, trial adoption, identity starting to apply as the decisions I'm making on board just to finish because this this model will inform the question you just ask.

So an adoption I'm onboarding something that fits with me. I've decided it's part of it's good for my life and lifestyle. I narrow it down to like a few, and then eventually I might even narrow down to a single one, maybe two. But now I've attached my identity to these things. I've vetted them. I've sort of peer reviewed them from my vantage point and said, these are good for me.

This is a reflection. It becomes a reflection of my identity because I've chosen to durably associate with that product. Right. Once that happens, and then I'm in and say, I get all the way to bright on that and like, this is my go to product. That product is kind of in a way locked to my identity. And now I'm not even making a decision anymore.

Now when I go into the aisle, it becomes a habit. I've got a pattern behavior. Once that behavior is patterned as such. It is a function of my identity. And that's where the risk of change becomes paramount. Once a brand gets to a certain level of maturity, where a large portion of their audience is operating in habit or patterned or routinized behavior, the brand has to understand that its consumers identity is tightly bound to that brand, because the strength of that patronage is a function of the strength of their identity tied to it.

And when you mess with the identity of the brand, you're not just saying, I'm just changing the esthetic here and oh, this new esthetic is nice. You're potentially risking assaulting that person's assemblage of behaviors in their life that sort of comprise their identity. So like in Cincinnati, there's like these two different chili companies and people get really locked into like, well, I like Skyline or Gold Star.

I live in Cincinnati, and their identities get really wrapped up in that, right? And you see this phenomenon with certain kinds of products that become very mature and develop these really loyal audience bases, obviously, with, with, you know, drinks like beers and things like that. People develop an identity connection to it.

And so when they change the brand, they're not just changing the design. They're changing that linkage between their branding and how it fits into people's self-identity. And when that brand changes that, and then all of a sudden it no longer fits the identity of the consumers that have aligned with it.

That's like, that doesn't fit me anymore. That's not me. It doesn't just something they don't like. It actually feels very uncomfortable for them. And they have to then expunge that relationship. They have to say that doesn't fit my identity anymore. That's no longer a part of how I am. And it's a little bit like breaking off a little piece of of who you are and saying, I have to get rid of that now.


00:16:36.230 — 00:17:39.140 · Jordan Buckner
Yeah. I love that. I was I have a couple questions on that, but I want to kind of circle back to a little bit later. So as as you mentioned, brands are coming in and they're thinking about usually market performance. Usually their sales are not performing where they want or their where their retailers want.

And so there's a, a commercial reason to want to do a rebrand to better position themselves in the market. And I've also seen from my experience as well, brands who realize they understand more about who they are as a company and who their customers are. And so they're saying like, okay, maybe our packaging right now is not resonating with our target market, and how can we really design a way to resonate with them more, to reach more people like that, to make more of that identity fit?

And so as you're kind of advising and thinking about this research, like how do you then top with brands around understanding what are those emotional cues that you want to bring into the packaging while coupling it with the the kind of commercial value cues of understanding, like we need to place this product in the category, people need to understand what it is, but also be attracted to it.

And how do you kind of advise brands on pulling those two things together.


00:17:39.180 — 00:18:44.550 · Sigi Hale
Yeah, I mean it really. It really is. You could see as you start to understand this model of these different types of decisions that very much hinges on where they're at, right? If they're Coke or Bud Light or something, and they've got this huge, loyal audience base, they can have a couple problems, right?

They could be somewhat stagnating because everyone's just patterned and like, say, they're really big and they're just routinized. Everyone's just routinized. And they might have some people kind of coming up on their heels that are challenging them and whatnot. And the, the brand that's really in that routinized kind of habit stage with most of its consumers.

They've got to do 1 or 2 things, like they want to protect the people that they've gotten trained. So you don't want to lose that base like you've got to keep, you know, it's very risky. It's like you've got all these people acting in an automated way. They're not even making decisions. You're their default and you can break that.

And then once you break that, they'll start to reevaluate. They'll go back to adoption and go through that arduous decision making process of realigning themselves to a competitor brand. And so you don't want to trip them up. You've got them. But then there are other brands who are kind of the chasers of those right established brands.


00:18:44.590 — 00:18:56.190 · Jordan Buckner
And I think that's where a lot of our listeners are too. Which is interesting because there's that stage of like realistically, maybe you have a 3000 people who are about your brand. Like, that's a lot, but it's not 10 million.


00:18:56.710 — 00:22:06.470 · Sigi Hale
Okay. So even going to that stage, yeah, if you're going that, then you're dealing with people who are in trial. And then it's really important to understand that you've got to work through these stages. So if you're really new and you're just starting out, you're working up against that kind of trial decision.

So most of the people are saying, hey, should I try this or should I not try this? And like energy drinks is a great example of how when they first when they came onto the scene, they were like really crazy. Say it like growth among a lot of the brands, right? Grow grow grow grow grow. But they never made it clearly that as a category never really transitioned into that adoption phase where people start to really differentiate.

They're starting to now, but in the early stages, like there wasn't really a lot of differentiation. People didn't really start to get to that adoption phase where they're like, let me adopt this particular thing to become part of my life and lifestyle and drink it every day like I do a coffee. Right? It became it was kind of stuck in trial.

It seemed, you know, it was like one thought and you had all this growth and then they would collapse and all this growth and collapsed. Because once you go through adoption and you build that more steady state patronage, that's when you start to get some stability. Right? Because trial is really dangerous because it's it's fickle, it's impulsive, it's subconscious.

People move around. There's no brand loyalty. So a lot of the people who are starting out, a lot of that's kind of the psychology they're going to be dealing with. And so motivation, fast communication, um, those kinds of communications that can quickly get a hook in and compel that identity like that looks like it could be for me.

Okay. Let me take a deeper look. And then the next, the most important thing is to be able to if you want to start elbowing out these established competitors, that you've got to earn your way into their, um, into their psychology toward, you earn the chance to have a sit down conversation and really convey that value proposition.

And that's where it's all about better than this. So it's like you have to think of it in stages. At first, you just have to be interesting enough. You have to catch enough attention to be interesting enough to be considered. If you get over that hurdle, then you've got to argue why you're better then. Because that's where that adoption psychology starts to play.

And people will start to say, hey, wait a second. This looks like it's got some reasons to believe, or it's got some features or some dynamics, or it's got some distinguishing elements that actually causing me to reconsider some of the decisions I thought were established. Let me reconsider. Does something that I hadn't thought about.

That's an interesting asset. Now, the value proposition on this is starting to make sense. So you're nudging your way into that adoption psychology and provoking that better than this. But you have to earn that. Like if a pack comes out and it's just right away. Dense, dense kind of information. They're not first achieving the the eye capture and that interest capture.

If they're not first doing those, you don't get to have the better than this conversation. And so you've got to think about it, these stage events. And then once you get to that better than this, it's all about like, you know, elbowing the brand to your left and right and really establishing why you're a better choice once you've earned the opportunity to be in that depth of conversation.


00:22:06.470 — 00:22:24.750 · Jordan Buckner
I love that. So before a redesign kind of reaches the shelf, are there ways brands can actually test for recognition risk? And you know, what should founders be measuring? To know whether a new design is going to has a likelihood of improving performance, rather than simply just looking better or looking different?


00:22:24.790 — 00:24:27.020 · Sigi Hale
Yeah. So one of the first things we do is, is really look closely within a given category at the relative level levels of these different kind of decisions that are going on, like how much brand loyalty is there? Is this a category? Mostly people are walking around in a habituated state with patterned behavior.

Or do we see the bulk of it in this adoption stage? So, like everyone in this space is sort of really deeply engaged in decision making? Or is it all kind of lighter, low patronage, low brand loyalty and lots of trial kinds of phenomena? Right. So first we have to understand the context we're working in. So then if somebody new to a given category and we find out that most of it is in this kind of trial psychology, we're like, you're going to have to fight for attention.

Like you're going to have to fight for attention, and you're going to have to do that quick motivation because it's all trial. It's kind of the Wild West, right? And so the way that we would build out that design is specifically to tackle that psychological challenge, whereas if we see a category is much more like, no, no, no, there's a lot of deep thinking here.

There's a lot of, um, adoption going on. People are narrowing their set. They're looking for reason. Durable reasons why something is better than something else. That's a totally different challenge to overcome. Because now we're saying, okay, this is what's going on. Everyone's thinking through this.

They're really making deep decisions. So you need to come in with your value proposition. We need to get buy in so that we can get you across the board where you will be considered. So it's like we look at sort of phenomenon that are related to that. And then we then focus on deep diving on why you're better than, you know, option X.

And so the value proposition becomes really, really important. So we actually think about design in relation to the category and the category dynamics and how that's working. So the very first thing we do is study the category. You know before we design the pack we say what's going on in the category. And then once we understand the category then we can optimize the design specifically that that kind of psychology.


00:24:27.100 — 00:25:08.760 · Jordan Buckner
Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense of doing that, because I think that's the other thing that's complicated about this is that there's dozens of products in the category. There's tons of different types of consumers and why they're buying. And so aligning the opportunity, the consumers with the packaging, reflecting back on them gets really complicated.

And so that's why it makes a ton of sense. Working with someone who understands the psychology and the consumer behavior behind why people are purchasing, who you're targeting and how to align in them so that they see themselves reflected back to you is so important. So thank you. Thanks so much for joining.

I know we could probably talk for hours and hours about this because it's really, really deep. But I appreciate you giving the the overview.


00:25:08.800 — 00:25:09.360 · Sigi Hale
No problem.


00:25:09.400 — 00:25:10.120 · Speaker 3
That was fun.


00:25:10.160 — 00:25:29.280 · Jordan Buckner
Perfect. Well I will put notes in the show notes below if you're interested in working with a design agency who understands the psychology behind why people buy and why people buy your product, definitely reach out. They're happy to work with you on your next project. Thanks so much again. See you. No problem.


00:25:29.280 — 00:25:30.040 · Sigi Hale
Thank you for having me.