Brand competitiveness depends on presentation now more than it did 20 years ago. Younger generations of consumers have grown up with media and services that are available at the push of a button, anytime and anyplace. This has been coined as the 'Amazon Effect'. Consequently, people are more comfortable now more than ever to purchase a product purely based on how it looks on a picture. Millennial and Gen-Z consumers play by a different set of rules and expectations regarding product and packaging thereof.
There are numerous stages the consumer undergoes and multiple states they experience when about to make a purchasing decision. One example is called a sensory state wherein their subconscious mind generates emotion and ultimately action regarding a product that has appealed to the consumer. The other state is the conscious state of the brain wherein the consumer has kept emotion away from the decision making process and is rather looking at and comparing the benefits and/or the disadvantages of the product in hand regardless of the appearance of the packaging and how it makes them feel.
With Experiencing a Product by Touch & Smell Out the Window - Visuals are the
New Pre-Sale Product Experience
While most cosmeceutical brands with ordinary packaging might appeal to the logical consumers who research the products thoroughly before deciding whether to purchase the product or not – more consumers are shunning logic when faced with packaging that appeals to their subconscious susceptibility towards luxury, ease and thus emotion. What happens is: the subconscious, emotion generating sensory cues affect the consumer and lead to instant action before the conscious, logical and calculative part of the brain can even respond - especially if the product is being purchased through a device wherein the transaction happens much quicker than it would during an in-store scenario.
Consumer psychologists agree that spontaneity towards purchasing products decreases as individuals grow older and tend to premeditate purchases well before the day of the purchase. While this may be the case – the greater number of active shoppers are well below the ‘conservative buyer’ stage and are likely to purchase products intuitively based on product appearance.
This is evident with findings from the World Bank Organization which claims that 42% of people in the world are under the age of 25 while in Africa and South Asia, the number of people aged between 12 and 24 had steadily risen to 525 000 000 in the year 2015 - nearly half the global youth population at the time.
With the global population becoming younger and focusing more on aesthetics than on sciences behind the craft – the way brands present themselves and their products has changed drastically since the late 1990s – visual matter has since then triumphed over fine-printed, science-backed benefits of product.
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