New Product Developments

Abstract

We investigate the factors that influence the visual search for bottles displaying a triangular label whose orientation differs from that of background distractors, using shampoo bottles as stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, the participants had to find a bottle having a triangular label in a different orientation from the others displayed as rapidly as possible. The results consistently demonstrated that searching for a trapezoidal-shaped bottle with a downward-pointing triangular label was faster than searching for the same bottle with an upward-pointing triangular label instead. In Experiment 3, participants rated the valence and bottle-label congruency for all of the packaging exemplars used in Experiments 1 and 2. The results revealed that the participants rated a downward-pointing triangular-shaped label as being more incongruent with trapezoidal-shaped bottles than an upward-pointing label. Our findings reveal that the downward-pointing triangle superiority (DPTS) effect elicited by the triangular-shaped label is also influenced by the silhouette of the bottle (which presumably provides a reference frame). Such interactions between label and silhouette have direct implications for packaging design.