Holistic Package Design and Consumer Brand Impression; Ulrich R. Orth & Keven Malkewitz

SUMMARY:
This article is about helping managers to choose or change already existing package designs so that consumer get the response to buy the product. There is an emprical study to explain how brands impressions are created in the minds of consumers with the help of holistic designs of the products. According to these emprical study, there are five types of holistic designs. These are, massive contrasting, natural, delicate and non descript designs. But, the question is which type of brand is linked with these types of holistic designs? The article explains that sincere brands should have natural package designs, exciting brands should have contrasting designs, competent brands should have delicate designs, sophisticated brands should have natural or delicate and rugged brands should have contrasting or massive designs. The article also argues for the trade offs among the impressions in the minds of consumers adopted by holistic design types and put forward their findings with several real packages. The article then continues to explain design elements and factors that are important to and are used by designers in differentiating package designs . At this point article argues for package designs should be studied from holistic perspective ; as more understandable holistic designs including the impressions they evoke with consumers is key for firms to understand package design and consumers’ response to it. Then the article tries the explain brand management literature to explain what types of responses managers desire. Because, the management wants to communicate through the design, brand package changes are decided in order to evoke desired impressions upon the judgement of the management. After this, the article put forth emprical investigation to show firms’ incentives to develop package design for achieving desired responses. In the investigation, prototypical holistic package designs and their relationships to generizable response dimensions are identified through wine package designs. In the end, cluster analysis generated five holistic designs differentiated by design factors that were coming from unique combination of package design elements. These clusters are massive, contrasting, natural, delicate and nondescript. In the end, the conclusion from the investigation is holistic package designs rooted in uniqe combination of design factors that leads a set of brand impressions in the minds of consumers. Thus association between types of designs and and resultant generic brand impressions are important points for management and designers to decide on the design of the package. Finally, the article makes a general discussion about managerial implications on developing and modifying package designs. Firstly, the article suggests the manager to take these five clusters that is holistic design in order to communicate better with the help of shared vocabulary , association and conventions with designers. Secondly, as the research shows the relationship between holistic package design and generic response dimensions, companies can create brand personality images based on these findings of impressions.Thirdly, holistic designs are characterized by generalizable design factors that are comig from specific design elements , give flexibilty to designers well-suited packages. Finally, the findings in holistice designs are useful to indentify the design that consumers may bemuse because of the similarity of the designs.
SEDA MUT-107604163