In the whole marketing process, the packaging box plays an extremely important role. It uses its own unique image language to communicate with consumers to influence consumers’ first emotions. When consumers see it for the first time, they will be interested in the product it packs. Packaging can both facilitate the success of the purchase transaction and cause it to fail, and the unobtrusive box can be overlooked by consumers.
Packaging has become the main marketing way in the actual commercial activities, and inevitably has a close relationship with the psychological activities of consumers. As a packaging designer, if you don’t understand consumer psychology, you will be blind. How to attract the attention of consumers, and how to further stimulate their interest, induce them to take the final purchase behavior, which must involve the knowledge of consumer psychology. Therefore, the study of consumer psychology and change is an important part of packaging design. Only by mastering and rationally applying the law of consumption psychology can we effectively improve the design quality, increase the added value of goods and improve the sales efficiency.
Consumer psychology research shows that consumers have complex psychological activities before and after purchasing goods, and the differences in age, gender, occupation, nationality, education level, social environment and many other aspects divide many different consumer groups and their different consumer psychological characteristics. According to the survey results of Chinese Social Survey Office (SSIC) on the consumer psychology of ordinary people in recent years, the characteristics of consumer psychology can be summarized as follows:
1、Practical-minded psychology
The main characteristic of most consumers’ consumption psychology in the process of consumption is practical-minded psychology. They believe that the actual utility of goods is the most important, and hope that the goods are easy to use, cheap and high-quality, and do not deliberately pursue beautiful appearance and novel styles. The consumer groups with practical-minded psychology are mainly mature consumers, working class, housewives, and elderly consumer groups.
2、Beauty-seeking psychology
Consumers with a certain economic capacity generally have a desire for beauty, pay attention to the shape of the product itself and the external packaging, and pay more attention to the artistic value of the product. The consumer groups who have a desire for beauty are mainly young people and the intellectual class, and women account for 75.3% of these groups. In terms of product categories, the packaging of jewelry, cosmetics, clothing, handicrafts and gifts should pay more attention to the expression of aesthetic value psychology.
3、Difference-seeking psychology
The consumer groups who hold the psychology of seeking differences are mainly young people under the age of 35. This type of consumer group believes that the style of goods and packaging is extremely important, and pays attention to novelty, uniqueness, and individuality, that is, the shape, color, graphics and other aspects of the packaging are required to be more fashionable and avant-garde, but the use value and price of the goods are not very important. In this consumer group, underage teenagers account for a considerable proportion. For them, the packaging of the product is sometimes more important than the product itself. For this group of consumers who cannot be ignored, the packaging design should highlight the “novelty” characteristics to meet their psychological needs of seeking differences.
4、Group psychology
Consumers with group psychology are willing to cater to the fashion trend or imitate the style of celebrities, and the age range of this kind of consumer group is larger, because various media promote fashion and celebrities vigorously to promote the formation of this psychological behavior. Therefore, the packaging design should grasp the popular trend, or directly launch the product image spokesperson favored by consumers, improve the trust of goods.
5、Famous brand psychology
No matter what kind of consumer group there is a certain psychology of seeking famous brand, they attach importance to the brand of the product, and have a sense of trust and loyalty to the well-known brand. When economic conditions permit, they even insist on subscribing regardless of the high price of the product. Therefore, packaging design to establish a good brand image is the key to the success of product sales.
Color and pattern are the basic elements and styles of gift packaging. It should be noted that different countries and regions or nations have different preferences and taboos for colors and patterns (color taboos of gifts) due to their different social systems, religious beliefs and customs. For example, China thinks yellow is a symbol of nobility, Venezuela and Germany also prefer yellow, the former Soviet Union thinks yellow is an unlucky symbol, France and Malaysia also taboo yellow, but The Islamic area regards yellow as the color of death; Blue in Egypt is often used to describe the color of evil; The red tricolor is a toxic symbol in the Czech Republic; In terms of patterns, the same elephant is regarded as a sacred object in Thailand, but it has become a taboo pattern in Britain. The pig pattern is absolutely not allowed to appear in Arab countries; Americans see bats as symbols of terror and death. Japanese people do not love lotus, but there are various lotus images in Chinese folk art. Chinese folk custom regards the owl as a bad omen. So these are absolutely not to be ignored when designing packaging patterns and colors.
In short, consumers’ interests and hobbies are formed for a long time and have a certain stability, but the psychology is complex, for the above psychological requirements, in most cases it is possible to synthesize two or more than two psychological requirements. The pursuit of psychological diversity also enables our product packaging to present the same diversified design styles.
