Abstract
Eye fixations on packaging elements are not necessarily correlated to consumer attention or positive emotions towards those elements. This study aimed to assess links between the emotional responses of consumers and the eye fixations on areas of interest (AOI) of different chocolate packaging designs using eye trackers. Sixty participants were exposed to six novel and six familiar (commercial) chocolate packaging concepts on tablet PC screens. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multivariate analysis were performed on eye tracking, facial expressions, and self-reported responses. The results showed that there were significant positive correlations between liking and familiarity in commercially available concepts (r = 0.88), whereas, with novel concepts, there were no significant correlations. Overall, the total number of fixations on the familiar packaging was positively correlated (r = 0.78) with positive emotions elicited in people using the FaceReader™ (Happy), while they were not correlated with any emotion for the novel packaging. Fixations on a specific AOI were not linked to positive emotions, since, in some cases, they were related to negative emotions elicited in people or not even associated with any emotion. These findings can be used by package designers to better understand the link between the emotional responses of consumers and their eye fixation patterns for specific AOI.
Highlights
Food product development and innovation have been important strategies of food companies that compete within global markets [1]
This study aimed to assess the links between the emotional responses obtained by facial expressions from consumers with the eye fixations on areas of interest (AOI) of different chocolate packaging designs using eye trackers to better understand consumers’ perceptions of different packages
The results showed that the Principal components analysis (PCA) explained a total of 70.0% (PC1 = 49.7% and principal component 2 (PC2) = 20.2%) of data variability for novel packaging concepts and
Summary
Food product development and innovation have been important strategies of food companies that compete within global markets [1]. Despite these strategies, over 60% of failure rates are sometimes observed in the market [2]. Previous studies conducted by Nielsen [3] showed that new products require an optimal duration time of six to twelve months to be accepted in the market. A challenge commonly faced by food companies is how to distinguish/differentiate competitive products in the market [5]. In order to accomplish this, methods to attract consumer attention have always been a challenge for food companies [6]
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