The impact of affective design of product packaging upon consumer purchase decisions

Affective design aims to create a product that has expected levels of functionality and usability but, additionally offers the user a positive emotional experience. Some success has been achieved by using the Kansei engineering approach but this has not been explicitly applied to packaging design.This paper reports on the first stages of an Affective Packaging Design research programme and presents the result of experiments that explore the relationships between consumer selection and packaging shape using a combination of questionnaires, focus groups and the semantic differential technique. The stimuli for the experiment were examples of confectionery packaging.Results will be presented which indicate relationships between confectionery packaging shape and recipient demographic profile. It is concluded that to inform the design process the study it is important to consider the whole purchase experience, for example, product purchaser, product user and purchase reasons.