Gérard Caron, the leading international design spokesman and founder of Carré Noir, the first design agency in France, has always sought to increase the renown of the design profession throughout the world. One of the initiators of PDA, the "Pan-European Brand Design Association", he also created "admirabledesign.com", a web site dedicated to the various forms of graphic design, and a forum for exchange between design professionals.

www.admirabledesign.com 

He hereunder unveils the mechanisms of the consumer's buying behaviour and the role that packaging design plays in that respect. 

How do we attract the consumer?

The answer lies mainly in the product identity, its presentation, the clever way it can be used...in a word, in its design. Its objective will basically be to open an area of desires in the consumer's imagination. The languages used by designers are in the realms of the irrational, in sensations, instinct, archetypes, and received ideas that bombard all individuals, and in particular the consumer pushing his shopping trolley or the executive in a car dealer's showroom! We know that consumers do not have a single form of behaviour when it comes to products. The irrational mixes with the rational to varying degrees according to the nature of the product and the circumstances surrounding the purchase...

The four types of buying behaviour

1. The functional attitude: The buyer only takes into account the purely utilitarian and functional aspect of the product. Any suggestion and any appeal to the imagination would be superfluous. In this case the buyer sticks to the product's functional value. 

2. The analytical attitude: The consumer turns into a genuine professional buyer, himself inventing his own way of buying. He weighs up, compares, and anlalysis the quality, the performance, the prices, and the novelty factor. He decides freely and in full knowledge of the facts...or at least he thinks he does. The products of reference brand analyse the four main types of consumer behaviour in the supermarket choice in so far as they add to rational arguments. 

3. The imaginary attitude: This is the attitude that links the products to certain fashion values and to new forms of behaviour, with strong consumer identification with the brand. Here, design can be linked to the impact of fashion, and an appeal to the senses is then a very important asset. Many products aimed at teenagers fall into this category. 

4. The recreational attitude: The purchaser distances himself from his day-to-day life, he seeks pleasure, humour, a break with reality. This behaviour is obviously linked to impulsive "fun" purchases or exclusive products or gadgets....

The mechanisms of perception

Today everybody is aware of the fact that our brain is made up of two essential hemispheres: the left side, which houses our capacity for analysis - our masculinity, and the right side, which houses our faculty for synthesis and our emotions - our feminity. The art of the designer is to switch constantly from one to the other. The consumer will quickly decipher colours and shapes, knowledge of which is built early on in a child's development. Other elements such as counting and reading are incorporated after the formation of our nervous system, and consequently, texts and numbers are less vivid elements! We are talking here of a perception measured in fractions of a second, but that is decisive when it comes to making a choice from what's on the shelves, when you know that an average consumer covers a metre per second in a hypermarket, and that a single look can encompass sixty brand names in a second! Nowadays consumers devote an average of fifty minutes in the hypermarket, as opposed to ninety minutes fifteen years ago...You have to be quick and act on the consumer's senses as much as, or indeed more than, on his thoughts. 

Always colour!

Colour is the most powerful of the visual languages at the designer's disposal. It has a twofold influence on the sense of perception, since it acts not only on our cultural references but also on our physiology. In 1996 on France 2, at the request of the producers of the programme Envoyé Spécial, I asked forty consumers, selected at random in a supermarket, to taste two yoghurts and to say which they preferred. One was in a sky-blue pot, whilst the ohter pot was a horrible greenish-yellow colour. Thirty-nine opted for the blue yoghurts which were said to be definitely "softier, creamier, more...". Of course it was the same brand and the same quality of yoghurt in the two pots!

Shape also has a language of its own

Some shapes will naturally be recognised as masculine and will adapt to packaging for energising products, shaving products, etc. Other shapes are said to be feminine, because they are protective, enveloping and reassuring. They are appropriate for dairy products, children's foods, cosmetic products, certain decorative items, the art of entertaining, and so on. The symbolism of shape, a complex language, leaves no room for error. Colours and shapes are two languages that "dominate" us, since they address our subconscious. They represent a formidable power, which, if well used, is a success factor. We have seen that in their choices, consumers mixed the rational with the irrational. The same goes for the designer as he goes about his work. That is the surest way of creating all the more successful products on markets that are saturated...