Packaging affects the decision making of the consumers that drives towards impulse buying, as well as, serves as a tool to flog the competitors.

Vishal Kamra, Navneet Bajwa vishalkamra@ymail.com,nav.bajwa7421@gmail.com Abstract

Product packaging is the science, art and technology of protecting products for the purposes of containment, protection, transportation/storage and information display. So package performs an important role in marketing communications, especially in the point of sale and could be treated as one of the most important factors influencing consumer’s purchase decision. By this article we seek to reveal elements of package having the ultimate effect on consumer choice, edge over the competitors and have an instant buying decision. Impulse purchasing is an important phenomenon for researchers in consumer behavior, thus this paper relates packaging as an aspect for impulsive buying as well as having a competitive edge over the competitors that might lead to erratic demand for the product.

Keywords

Packaging, Elements of Packaging, Consumer Behavior, Impulse Buying, Sales and Competitors.

Introduction

Packaging seems to be one of the most important factors in purchase decisions made at the point of sale, (Prendergast and Pitt, 1996) where it becomes an essential part of the selling process. (Rettie and Brewer, 2000).Package becomes an ultimate selling proposition stimulating impulsive buying behavior, increasing market share and reducing promotional costs.( Rita Kuvykaite, Aistė Dovaliene, Laura Navickiene 2009)Package attracts consumer’s attention to particular brand, enhances its image, and influences consumer’s perceptions about product. Also package imparts unique value to products, works as a tool for differentiation, i.e. helps consumers to choose the product from wide range of similar products stimulates customers buying behavior and thus creates a competitive edge over the others. Literature analysis on question under investigation has shown that there is no agreement on classification of package elements, research methods of package impact on consumer’s purchase decision and its effects on sales collaboratively. Some of researchers try to investigate all possible elements of package and their impact on consumer’s purchase decision (Silayoi & Speece, 2004; Silayoi & Speece, 2007; Butkeviciene, Stravinskiene & Rutelione, 2008), while others concentrates on separate elements of package and their impact on consumer buying behavior (e.g., Vila & Ampuero, 2007; Madden, Hewett & Roth, 2000; Underwood et al., 2001; Bloch, 1995). Moreover some researchers investigate impact of package and its elements on consumer’s overall purchase decision (e.g., Underwood et al., 2001), while others – on every stage of consumer’s decision making process (e.g., Butkeviciene et al., 2008). Furthermore the abundance of scientific literature on this issue do not provide unanimous answer concerning impact of package elements on consumer’s impulsive buying behavior and its impact on sales to flog the competitors: diversity of the results in this area depends not only on research relations generated amongst all three set of variables, but on the context of the research too. All above mentioned confirms the necessity to investigate this issue in more detail. In the light of these problematic aspects, research problem could be formulated as following question: how packaging affects consumer’s impulsive buying behavior and how it relates to increase in sales and thus proves as a competitive edge for others.

Objective:

In this paper we seek to generate the relation amongst the variables of packaging, impulse buying and enhance sales as a tool to flog the competitors. We divided variables in three segments: 1) Packaging variables 2) Impulse buying variables 3) Increase in sales variables and hence tried to generate relations amongst all of these.

Packaging features include :

Impulse Buying includes :

Enhance Sales includes: Relation generated with respect to Fig 1, Fig 2, Fig 3 to formulate our research: