Impact of Packaging to Consumers

Abstract

Marketing is about meeting your customers’ needs and to be successful in it one must understand how they behave before they decide to purchase such product. It was found out that packaging is one of the most important elements a consumer considers before he buys a product. The factors in a packaging of a product that drives a consumer to buy a product are the quality of the packaging material (it must be safe and efficient), design, its usefulness, color and typography are the major elements. These were confirmed in the survey conducted among the DLSU RVR-COB students. Any marketing person therefore should look into these elements in packaging to drive purchase at the point of sale.

Introduction

One of the recent trends in marketing in this day and age is the importance of packaging because consumers are confronted with so many products and services to choose from. According to Belch & Belch (1999), an average American supermarket houses 20,000 products in their shelves. This commodity with many choices competes in the mind of the consumers within a 30-minute shopping. Today’s consumers are becoming meticulous in their choices of products to buy because people nowadays they do multi-tasking jobs and hence are so busy and pre occupied with so many things. They want more information that are simply stated or shown in the products they buy. Faced with these choices, the product packaging has been one of the best marketing tools at the point of purchase. Marketers must know how to get their products bought by way of good packaging. Now what critical factors must be considered to influence purchase decision as it relates to packaging. The objective of the study is to determine the impact of packaging to the consumer’s purchasing decision. Therefore, when doing the research, questions that must focus on how big of a variable is packaging when it comes to customer’s purchasing decisions?

Several studies done concluded that product (and even services) packaging contributes to the successful decision of a consumer to buy the product and influence repeats Product packaging are the final opportunity of every marketers to influence the purchase decision of a consumer. It relays the brand message and advantages of the product versus competitors therefore it has become the preferred brand. Therefore, this paper wants to prove that packaging is a big factor when it comes to the student’s purchasing power because it can influence their decision in buying.

Review of Related Literature

A literature review on this subject shows that the packaging of a product affects the buying decision of consumers. According to McDaniel (2013) packaging has three important functions. It contains and protects the product, promotes the product, and facilitates storage. With good quality and safe packaging