MT459 Unit 5 Package Attention Study Example

The Cat Gets Seen, the Claim Does Not: An MT459 Unit 5 Perception and Attention Study of a Litter Bag

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT459: Consumer Behavior

Unit 5 Perception and Attention Study

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The litter brand, its package designs, the participants and every result are composite; the sources cited are real.

The Question

A lightweight clumping litter sold at Linwood Pet Supply, the composite pet store studied through this course, weighs about half as much as clay litter for the same number of uses. Earlier units suggested that weight matters to buyers more than they say: shoppers lift bags before choosing, and litter switches follow moves to upstairs apartments. Yet the product's package barely mentions weight. This study asks whether shoppers even notice the claim, and whether a redesign would help.

Two Kinds of Attention

Two mechanisms of attention organize the study, and each test is matched to one. The first is attention a package captures without the viewer looking for anything, driven by size, contrast, color and especially faces and animals. The second is attention a viewer directs while searching for something specific. A package can succeed at one and fail at the other. Pieters and Wedel (2004) found in eye-tracking studies of print ads that pictures capture attention regardless of their size, while text earns attention mainly in proportion to how large it is, which suggests a small claim beside a large photograph will lose.

The Two Designs

The current bag shows a large photograph of a cat filling the top half, the brand logo below it and, near the bottom in small type, the words "half the weight of clay." The redesign keeps a smaller cat photograph but places the weight claim in a large icon, a bag beside a heavier clay box with "half the weight" in bold, at the same height as the logo.

Test One: Five-Second Exposure

Seventy-two adult cat owners, recruited from Linwood's loyalty program, took part on a tablet in the store's training room. Thirty-six saw the current bag and thirty-six the redesign, assigned by alternating order of arrival. Each saw the bag front for five seconds, then listed everything they could recall.

With the current bag, 31 of 36 recalled the cat, 12 the logo and 5 the weight claim. With the redesign, 20 recalled the cat, 14 the logo and 23 the weight claim.

Five of thirty-six owners noticed the product's one real advantage on the current bag.

The current design does its job of catching the eye, but what it catches the eye with, the cat, says nothing about this product that a dozen rival bags do not also say. The weight claim, the reason to buy this litter rather than another, almost disappears.

Test Two: Timed Search

The second test gave participants a goal. Each was told, "Find the lightweight litter," and shown a photograph of a shelf holding eight litter bags, including the test bag in one of three randomized positions. Time to touch the correct bag was recorded. With the current bag, participants took 7.8 seconds on average. With the redesign, 3.1 seconds.

Search reveals a different weakness. Even a shopper who wants a lightweight litter cannot find this one quickly, because nothing on its front signals weight at a glance. Clement (2007) found in an eye-tracking study of in-store choice that shoppers spend only brief moments on each package and rely on visible cues to find what they want, which makes a glance-sized signal essential.

What the Two Tests Show Together

The current bag catches attention but spends it on the wrong feature, and it fails a shopper who comes looking for its advantage. The redesign gives up some of the cat's pull, recall of the cat fell from 31 to 20, but makes the product's reason to exist both noticeable and findable. Solomon (2020) describes perception as a sequence of exposure, attention and interpretation, and the redesign improves the middle step for the one message that matters.

Why Faces and Animals Win

The cat's pull is not a design accident. People notice faces, and animal faces, faster than almost any other feature of a scene, and a large, high-contrast photograph at the top of a package draws the first glance before any words are read. That is why nearly every litter brand puts a cat on its bag, and why the cat on this bag, however appealing, cannot distinguish it from its neighbors. The weight claim is the only element on the package that no rival can copy honestly.

Limits

The samples are small and drawn from one store's loyalty members, who already know the category. A tablet is not a shelf: lighting, distance and neighboring products all change what people see. Recall measures what people remember, not everything they noticed, so the current bag's claim may have been seen and forgotten. And the search test told participants what to look for, which real shoppers may not do. The results should be checked with a shelf test in two stores before any redesign is printed.

Recommendation

Adopt the redesign for a test run in two stores, with the cat photograph kept but reduced and the weight icon placed at the logo's height. Measure sales of the product against two control stores for eight weeks. If the redesign raises sales among shoppers new to the product, roll it out.

References

Clement, J. (2007). Visual influence on in-store buying decisions: An eye-track experiment on the visual influence of packaging design. Journal of Marketing Management, 23(9-10), 917-928. https://doi.org/10.1362/026725707X250395

Pieters, R., & Wedel, M. (2004). Attention capture and transfer in advertising: Brand, pictorial, and text-size effects. Journal of Marketing, 68(2), 36-50. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.2.36.27794

Solomon, M. R. (2020). Consumer behavior: Buying, having, and being (13th ed.). Pearson.