At the time of designing a pack, the tendency to attend to scientific innovations grows to provide innovative ideas about colors and shapes. -Néstor Braidot


* Doctor of Sciences, Master of Neurobiology of Behavior and in Cognitive Neuroscience. [email protected]


Among many others, the fundamental contribution of the neurosciences applied to marketing and advertising is to focus both marketing research and the application of marketing and advertising strategies to the true decisional center of the human being: his meta-consciousness, which is where human decisions are generated and from where their behavior and preferences arise.
Using the strategies proposed by the latest developments in the field of science when designing packaging allows us to maximize the communication potential that it has. Thus, thanks to tools such as sensory neuro-marketing, we can understand how the perception of forms and images works and how they impact in a broad way on people who, based on that impact, elaborate their own conception.
All packaging must impact, stand out among their peers and convey to the customer what the product is and why it should be chosen. Now, how to do this?
Imagine that we are observing a customer in a supermarket. We know that, while you are going through it, you are looking for a packaged cheese. You only have an idea of what you want, but you do not know the brand and neither the prices. Also, we know that your time is scarce and possibly the variable price that precipitates your decision.
When you stop at the shelf, you take a glance to quickly examine a huge variety of options in terms of brands, flavors, types, texture and sizes. Where will you stop? Except that your view only records the price, you will most likely see the product that has a pack with a design attractive enough to capture your attention. However, there may be several with similar characteristics, in fact, companies compete side by side to optimize the management of their "silent sellers."
The brain perceives globally and integrates the sensory and perceptual information it receives as a function of the context. If we only look, we activate a reduced number of neural connections within the visual context. If, in addition, we touch the packaging, we activate a much larger number of direct and indirect connections between tactile and visual areas.
Therefore, both the graphic design of the packaging and its shape must convey immediate sensory benefits that evoke the central attributes of the product, such as taste, texture and nutritional capacity in the example we have been developing.
As we see, the packaging design goes far beyond the functionality associated with the containment of the product. The packaging must always be designed in the multisensory uptake of humans because the associative connections between senses also help the memory that plays a central role in the decisions of the customer.


-Colors and labels-


As members of the packaging, the labels must contain all the necessary attributes to make them attractive, starting with the colors and continuing with the ability of the message to transmit a clear concept in a synthetic form. One of the theories that explains how the brain decodes color in the visual cortex is called the trichromatic theory of color vision and forms the basis of many studies that have been conducted on the subject.
The senses are integrated and the perception of the color of an object influences the characteristics of the other senses. In turn, color conditions our memory on that object in a particular way.
This phenomenon of multisensory perception suggests some interesting issues regarding the strategies to be used in terms of colors, not only for the product to stand out, but also so that it can be associated with the image that you want to communicate through the packaging and the label.
The applications to the marketing activity of the knowledge about the perception of colors and the way in which our senses are interacting are endless. Not only the colors, but also the contrast that we are able to achieve among them constitute a primary stimulus to attract the customer's gaze towards the product that the organization is marketing.
From this it follows that when designing the packaging and the label it will be very useful to carry out a study using neuro-marketing techniques. As every product is what each customer perceives to be, knowing the areas that are activated in his or her brain when he or she is in contact with these two central parts that make up his or her identity system, it will always help us to be more effective in the development of the marketing strategies.
Undoubtedly, the images of a product in the minds of customers are the raw material on which we must begin to work.