Visual Storytelling in Retail

In this episode we are talking about the power of visual. Its role in retail, how to attract more attention, and what brands are doing to tell better stories.

Experienced brand manager, Mehdi El Bayad, and visual cognition professor, Isabelle Mareschal, share their expertise and insights with us. 

Here is an overview of the conversation – watch full episode above or links below to listen on Spotify!

Q: How can brands stand out from their competition in store and what key visual aspects do brands need to consider to attract more consumer attention? 

Mehdi: You can leverage two touch points. First, packaging, and second, the POS material. You have other touch points that you can leverage, but they are not necessarily linked to something that is tangible in-store. I'm going to only focus on the packaging and the POS material. The packaging has a mission. We perceive it as marketeers as a means of communication. Sometimes it's the most important one. We forget that the first mission of a packaging is that it should contain what it contains and that it should protect the product. It's important to keep in mind this hierarchy and this first mission of the packaging. Now, after this, of course, we should focus on the design. Does it attract the buyer's attention? Does it stand out on shelf? Does it communicate what the product is? I go to stores and I'm open to discover new products, and I can't tell what this product is just from the packaging because the message is so unclear, or sometimes it's really crowded and you don't really understand what this product is. What is the nature of the product? What are the advantages or the strengths?  

Our hope always is that the packaging triggers the purchase, seduces the shopper in store, that we keep this seduction, if I may say. Even after the purchase, we want the consumer to understand how to open the packaging. We want the experience to be easy.  

The main constraint of the packaging is the space. In a CPG environment and in a supermarket in general, the products are small. We can't express everything that we want to express correctly unless we start writing very tiny text and using very tiny visuals that nobody will see. POS material is a really good opportunity to keep the momentum and extend this story and tell a different story depending on the season or depending on the angle we want to tackle, because a brand can have many stories to tell, not only one story.  

Isabelle: I think in terms of what sorts of things would make a brand stand out, at least from a perceptual perspective, usually the things that are very important are things like color. The color of the material that you're using. There's a lot of research showing that some colors are more soothing than others. Men and women have different sensitivity to color. Actually, just based on the receptors in the eyes. So about 10% of men are color deficient, whereas that's not the case with women.  

I think it's also important to know that there are age-dependent differences as well in how people, mainly with color, again, detect colors. As you get older, your eyes, the lens in your eyes become yellow. And so that attenuates a number of blue green colors. I think it's important to actually consider the human, the buyer, to think about from a visual perception perspective, the things that will stand out for them.  

There's quite a lot of work that shows that actually one of the first things that draws people's attention is social information. Anything that has a face on it, certainly more with adults than children, but pretty much all humans like faces and look at faces. That will draw your attention very quickly. I think it's a balance of getting the right colors. Obviously, it depends on what message your brand is trying to sell. It might not be suitable to have a face on it, but it may be possible to come up with things that might still tap into that innate attraction.  

Q: Does sensory overload in a visually rich retail environment impact decision-making and purchase behavior?  

Isabelle: Decision-making is quite complicated, and there's a number of things that lead to someone making a decision. You first get sensory information, generally visual, but maybe other things as well. Then you use your prior knowledge of this sensory information, and that will affect the decision you make about whether you want to buy this or not. This might tap into this idea of when brands change a bit too radically their look, it may actually affect people because these elements that lead to your decision making are being disturbed. The associations that you have of that visual with happy memories of childhood or whatever it is, are distorted. It's again, probably something that will depend on the age of your target audience. But I think when you get sensory overload, it's quite difficult as well to parse the information. I think we've probably all experienced that in some stores where there's just so much stuff, you just can't find what you're looking for. It's very well known in visual perception, there's a phenomenon called visual crowding, which is that you actually can't find your target if there are too many things around it. I think in general, sensory overload is probably helpful in terms of trying to get people to buy the brand you're trying to get them to buy, with the caveat that I think younger children...I mean, obviously, they're not the ones necessarily buying, but they will pester their parents to buy.  

Mehdi: It's really a big challenge. Without being a brand manager, even as a shopper in store, it's really overwhelming, especially when you buy for the first time or you are not used to buying this category of products. A lot of brand managers, when we work on packaging, we work with our agencies, we work in the office, and we work on our computers first, and then we have the mock-ups sometimes we forget that it's not only us. Whether with the product or, for example, whether with a video advertising that will go online or on TV, it's really crowded. You really need to imagine yourself within this very heterogeneous, colorful environment.  

It depends on the categories because some categories are mature. For example, when you go in a store, for sure, snacking or potato chips, it's a really big space of the supermarket. The brands have enough space to express themselves, and you have many facings on the same flavor or on the same product within the same brand. You can have a brand block on shelves when your category is big and mature enough. Paradoxically, the more the category is small, the more brands you have, especially, for example, if you go to something more niche, and the more the category is big and mature and confirmed, the less brands you will have and the more clarity you will have.  

I was involved in the launch of a cosmetic men brand, which is not very common in the beauty and cosmetics industry that is dominated by female consumers. We did not use the same philosophy of packaging when it comes to male consumers, especially in cosmetics, because this target needs a clearer packaging with less text and a direct message, and sometimes a preference for something 2 in 1 or something 3 in 1. While for female consumers, we were more into product-specific for each need. For example, we had a 3 in 1, shampoo, body shower, and soap for men. This is impossible for female consumers. They would not buy something like that.  

Q: From your background and your research, you mentioned attention earlier on, and I know color is really important. But beyond color, are there other aspects, like texture, pattern? Are there other things that packaging can do to grab that attention? 

Isabelle: There are a lot people who work on things like the perception of gloss, so glossy textures or glossy surfaces. Generally, people like that as opposed to matte. Absolutely, I think all of these properties that define the visual characteristics of an object are going to be important. It's just initially the one that trumps in a first glance is going to be color, bearing in mind, as I said, this caveat that at least 10% of men have a color deficiency, so their experience of color is going to be a bit different.  

I think one thing that's been interesting listening to Mehdi talk is where this product is placed, not just in the store with respect to its at eye level, so you're more likely to see it but with what's around it as well. That's going to be very important because how you perceive When we do tests in labs, we usually show people, here's an object on a screen, and do whatever task we want. But of course, in a store, and you may get consumers to come in and say, oh, this is my favorite, and maybe everyone is going to agree that the white box with the red thing is the best. But of course, what you find in the lab is possibly going to be quite different, actually, from what you find in the store and being able to recreate that store visual experience, but also just navigating the store.  

Another thing is that adults have a good sense of navigation, but actually children don't really have a good sense of navigation. If you want children to find something, you need to make it always be in the same consistent location, presumably even across the different stores. It's always next to the fruit and vegetables or something. There's a number of these more cognitive factors that are probably going to come into play that affect overall decision making.  

Thank you for joining us for another episode! 

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