5. Packaging as a source of information

Consumers have become increasingly reliant on packaging carrying a variety of forms of information, including details of contents, “best before” dates, nutritional values for foods, dosages for drugs, and so on. Some of this information is required by law to protect consumers including nutritional details for food and drink items, but it also allows comparison between products as well as providing more general information on consumption (such as how to use the contents correctly). Legally required information, though, can vary from country to country, as can conventions or norms that producers generally follow. For instance, there is variation across Europe in how supermarkets and food companies display front-of-pack nutritional information; some favouring “traffic lights” based on fixed units of measurement (e.g. 100g or 100ml) whilst others use "guideline daily amounts" (“GDAs”) (often based around portion sizes).

In respect of consumers’ needs to help them make appropriate judgments, the information communicated via packaging would ideally have the following five attributes:

• honest, in that it does not misrepresent the product (for example, not dishonestly misrepresenting the value of a larger “big value” pack);

• truthful, in that it withholds no facts essential to the proper and safe use of the product;

• sincere, in that it does not deliberately confuse the issue;

• comprehensible, in that it does not use vocabulary that is too specialised or too vague;

• complete, in that it explains everything a typical consumer would find useful to an evaluation of the product and its performance.

In its role as a source of information, packaging provides informative and visual elements which facilitate consumers to make their purchase decisions. The informative elements could tend to cover a wide range of aspects, including product information, instruction of usage, nutrition values, brand, country/producer, price, ingredients and more recently nutritional labelling including traffic light colour coding or GDAs. Visual elements supporting this information and providing the consumer with appropriate cues could include graphics, colours, size, form, and material of the packaging.

Busy lifestyles and the increasing time pressure on shoppers limits the amount of time consumers are willing to spend looking at a product; typically only for about a few seconds, regardless of how many elements or messages there are on the package. With potentially more than two-thirds of purchase decisions made at point of sale, packaging with a distinctive appearance and containing simple and accurate information can make the difference when it comes to purchasing decisions. This serves as an important counter to overloading the consumer with information, since adding additional messages to the package increases the likelihood that a shopper will miss any single message. For this reason marketers generally recommend that only two to three key points of communication are placed on a front label. Adding more messages is likely to clutter the label (which often detracts from appeal and perceived quality), and makes it more difficult for people to absorb the key information/communication from the label.

One of the core strengths of packaging as a marketing communication vehicle is its inherent accessibility at point of purchase. This relationship can be both critical and complex at the same time: critical because in order for the package to communicate, it has to attract the attention of consumers first; and complex because it needs to balance the packaging elements by understanding the consumer purchasing behaviour and patterns.