For decades, marketers of consumer goods designed highly adorned packages, deploying bold colors, snazzy text, cartoons, and illustrations to seize the attention of shoppers. Conventional wisdom held that with thousands of products competing against one another in the aisles of big-box stores and supermarkets, companies needed to do everything in their power to make their products stand out.
But recently, there’s been a move toward simplicity. The stripped-down packaging you’ll often see is reminiscent of the minimalist art that flourished in the 1960s. A reaction against overly complex, representative works, the art that emerged in this period was characterized by spareness and abstraction. Any elements deemed unnecessary were removed.
What’s behind the move toward elegant but uncluttered packaging designs? Recent research I conducted with marketing professors Rosanna K. Smith and Julio Sevilla explored whether shoppers actually prefer this packaging —and, if so, why.
When less is more
First, we wanted to see if shoppers were willing to pay more for products in these packages. So we analyzed over 1,000 consumer goods, such as shampoo, deodorant, crackers, and cereal, from the largest supermarket chain in the U.S.
We had two research assistants code for the extent to which the packaging design was simple or complex. We then averaged their ratings to create a measure of packaging design simplicity. From this data, we found that products in simple packaging generally had higher retail prices than similar products that didn’t. The higher retail prices indicate that shoppers are willing to pay more for products in this packaging.
Next, across a series of experiments, we recruited students from a public university. We asked them to look at different packaged products, tell us how much they were willing to pay for those products, how many ingredients they thought the products might have, and how pure they perceived the products to be.
We found that the preference for simple packaging was due to the fact that pared-down designs sent a subtle yet powerful signal: purity. This happened because the simplicity of the product package made participants more likely to assume that the product contained fewer ingredients, along with fewer preservatives, added colors, or artificial flavors.
