Strawberry?

Have you ever noticed how a brand’s logo often says something about the product? The badly-pixellated Royal Tru-Orange logo up there is, surprisingly, mostly orange. It even has a little orange slice up on top. Even if you’ve never seen, heard, or tasted Royal, you can probably guess that it’s some sort of orange-y drink.

The Sprite logo is a bit more of a stretch. It’s green, and so are limes, and that’s definitely a fruit from the lemon family above the “i”. It’s also supposed to look like the sun and sea, so you’ve got that refreshing vibe. If you know anything about how soft drinks work, you’ll easily figure out that Sprite is a lime-based drink.

Then there’s the Coca-Cola logo. It’s... well. It’s pretty red. And there are some white stripes here and there. And a little more red. So that means it’s... strawberry flavoured?

It might make sense to a lot of people that a product’s colour and packaging influence the way consumers think about it. In fact, a 1995 study by researchers Smets and Overbeeke showed that orange packaging led people to believe that the product would be sweeter than did white packaging. (Smets, 1995) The more recent 2011 study “Tough package, strong taste: The influence of packaging design on taste impressions and product evaluations” has shown that this isn’t always the case. (Becker, 2011)

In that experiment, the colour of the packaging did nothing for the tester’s impression of the product at all. What they did find, however, was that the shape of the product can affect the attitude of the consumer to the product, and how expensive they think it is.

So what does this mean? Should all product packaging henceforth be pointy and white? Do we do away with rounded bottles and cases in favour of its angular siblings? As always, a conclusion can’t be made based on only one article. If the idea of colour influencing the customer’s view of a product can be contested almost twenty years after an experiment was performed, then it’s pretty clear that there hasn’t been enough research, both theoretical and practical, to really say so.

In the meantime, enjoy your product packaging for their witty and colourful selves, and hope you don’t end up like this guy: Link

References:

Becker, L., Rompay, T., Schifferstein, H., Galtezka, M. (2011). Tough package, strong taste: The influence of packaging design on taste impressions and product evaluations. Food Quality and Preference. 22(1), pp. 17-23.

Smets,G., Overbeeke, C. (1995). Expressing tastes in packages. Design Studies. 16(3), pp. 349-365.