95 What Should My Package Say?

eaten as a snack, for lunch, and even for dinner. Cereal has even penetrated the out - of - home - eating situations. Cereals can be found in the form of snack bars — grab, eat, and run. Marketers relish such expansion of uses, and the sheer number of opportunities (also called meal occasions) sparks the corporate imagination. Just think of the young brand manager who is handed the job of growing a company ’ s cereal business, or as it happens, to grow the use of a specifi c cereal brand.

In the increasingly competitive food industry, this opportunity could mean a new product, a new form, even a hybrid product that combines cereal with “ something else. ” Think of breakfast bars, which 20 - plus years ago were a great new, innovative idea, allowing people to eat cereal “ on the run. ” You can scarcely go to a convenience store or a health - and - wellness store like Whole Foods, Inc., without being assaulted with the latest innovations in cereal bars.

Cereal is also fi nding its place among established comfort foods such as ice cream and chocolate. Simply stated, in some circles, cereal also has turned into a mood food. Think of the days your mother would make you a bowl of cereal in the morning before you went off to school. The old familiar fl avor and aromas fl ood your memories with each spoonful to bring you back to simple pleasures.

How the Company Gets Ideas for Cereal

To prepare for this chapter, we took a trip to three super- markets and observed what people did when they shopped the cereal aisle. You can do this yourself; it doesn ’ t require much expertise, just a bit of discretion, although probably not even that. In the cereal aisle, we watched how people shopped the cereal (also called shopped the cereal category). Shoppers picked up the box, and after about 2 – 5 seconds (i.e., quickly but not immediately), they turned the box to the side and the back, read the panel, and then replaced the product or, in some cases, put the cereal into their shopping carts. For the most part, shoppers looked as if they were weighing some aspects of the cereal, which was quite surprising to us who had been schooled in the fact that today ’ s shopper hardly pays attention to the product anymore.

Our research question was fairly simple. What are these consumers looking for? What drives their choices? Why in a world where time is so precious and where the minutes in a supermarket seem to be spent scurrying about, do people who pick up cereals look so carefully now - common cereals made from rice, wheat, barley,

oats, maize (corn), sorghum, rye, and certain millets, with corn, rice, and wheat being the most important. A new cereal, triticale, adds to the list, but triticale is a man - made, genomically created product. Triticale comes from crossing wheat and rye, thus doubling the number of chromosomes (Source: AskDrSears.com ).

Today, cold cereal, also called RTE or ready - to - eat, is a booming industry, constantly growing to keep up with the ever - changing demands of today ’ s savvy consumers. As recently as 10 years ago, the industry presented con- sumers with noticeably fewer choices. Consumers typi- cally didn ’ t demand much. Observational research, so - called “ shopper insights, ” revealed that consumers generally homed in immediately on what they wanted. They typically went directly to the familiar location on the shelf to fi nd and select their family ’ s cereal.

Now, a walk down the cereal aisle can be quite long, fi lled with offerings, amazing in the variety to be found. And so looking at how companies market their cereal products provides us with a nice study topic to introduce to our world of design. But fi rst, let ’ s deal with the ideas, the hot buttons that ultimately the designer will have to incorporate in the package.

With such a history and pedigree, cereals have lots of things that can be said about them. All cereal grains have high - energy value, coming mainly from the starch frac- tion but also from the fat and protein. In general, cereals are low in protein content, although oats and certain millets are exceptions. Whole - grain foods are valuable sources of nutrients that are lacking in the American diet, including dietary fi ber, B vitamins, vitamin E, selenium, zinc, copper, and magnesium. Whole - grain foods also contain phytochemicals, such as phenolic compounds, that together with vitamins and minerals may play impor- tant roles in disease prevention (see Burkitt and Trowell, 1975 ; Jacobs et al., 1998 ; Slavin et al., 2001 ; Liu, 2003 ; Koh - Banerjee et al., 2004 ; Flight & Clifton, 2006 ; Kochar et al., 2007 ).

So, with so many good things to say, what works? Specifi cally, how can we get winning ideas about what we might put on a package?

Cereal — A Matrix on Which to Develop New Ideas

We, in the early part of the twenty - fi rst century, no longer think of cereal as merely a breakfast item. The magic and innovativeness of marketing changed all that. Cereal is

Chapter 10 What Should My Package Say? 97

of the numbers we get from regression, namely the

proportion of our respondents who accept a specifi c idea or element .

5. We worked with 36 elements. The full set of elements to be tested divided into six logical silos or buckets, each silo comprising six different, related, or similar types of elements. The respondent evaluated 48 dif- ferent combinations, with each element appearing three times in the set of 48 combinations. Each respondent evaluated a separate and unique set of 48 combinations, although from time to time a respon- dent might evaluate a concept that another respondent had seen. For the most part, however, the concepts were unique, avoiding the bias that would occur if the same combination were to be evaluated by everyone.

6. Each element was a free agent in the set so that we could estimate the impact or contribution of each element to the rating. We performed this analysis at the individual level.

Finding Ideas to Test — Sometimes Easier but Also Occasionally Harder than You Might Think

When we were brainstorming the categories that would best describe our topic, we simply thought about what fi rst comes to mind when we think about cereal. Although people might feel that coming up with these ideas is dif- fi cult, the truth of the matter is quite different. Think about a product for a long time (e.g., 5 – 10 minutes!), and you are likely to come up with the silos and the elements. Let ’ s follow this train of thought:

Silo 1: Texture

We selected this category to represent the various “ mouthfeels ” of a cereal. It ’ s well known that cereals are prized for texture. We wanted to look at textures that were crunchy, those that were light and crispy, those that were hearty and dense, and even those that were soft and chewy.

Silo 2: Flavor

Cereal fl avors can be traditional or niche. Examples of traditional are Brown Sugar and Cinnamon. Examples of niche fl avors are Vanilla Bean and Milk Chocolate. Packages often feature graphics to support the fl avors, but we merely worked with fl avor names.

at the package? Is it taste, nutrients, brands, respectively? Or, perhaps, is it the eye - catching glitzy package design and graphics? Does it differ among males and females, or differ between younger and older ages? What differ- ences can we fi nd between people who consume cereal on a frequent basis as opposed to those who don ’ t? What ’ s going on in the consumer ’ s mind? We set out to test these observations of consumers with consumers. Who could tell us better?

We wanted to test a wide range of stand - alone mes- sages or elements. Elements are pieces of information, communicated as text statements, which defi ne a feature, benefi t, claim, idea, etc. We tested these elements among consumers to see which are most appealing and resonate best, what they don ’ t really care about, and what turns them off altogether. We ’ re not yet at the stage of dealing with packages, but rather just with the information that might be contained in the graphics. So let ’ s look at what the results offer the product manufacturer or graphic designer, who then has to create the most effective package for the cereal product.

Setting the Stage for Research — Systematic Combination of Ideas

Keep in mind the systematic experimentation that we describe extensively in the section on “ Tools. ” This tool, RDE (Rule Developing Experimentation) works in a straightforward manner. To reiterate a couple of salient ideas:

1. People don ’ t know what they want until they see it. 2. You get more realistic results when you present com- binations of ideas together. That ’ s the way nature works anyway, so let us replicate nature rather than present people with one idea at a time.

3. If you systematically vary the combinations or vignettes so the respondent sees a set of these combi- nations, then you can identify what each cereal element “ brings to the party. ” You use regression analysis, a standard statistical method found as a feature in most spreadsheet programs, but almost always available in common statistical packages. We talked about regression analysis in Chapter 5 on systematics.

4. We had a choice of using the ratings or dividing the ratings into classes (accept versus reject the combina- tion of ideas). We chose to work with the binary world of accept/reject. This leads to a specifi c interpretation

Silo 3: Ingredients

What do consumers really think is important, when it comes to ingredients or fundamentally the content of the cereal? Do they really care about fi ber, whole grains, reduced sugar, or fat content? Do these ingredients drive a person to buy?

Silo 4: Nutrients

We hear so much about consumers wanting their food choices today to be nutritious, especially in a food that typically starts the day. How strongly do claims such as “ All natural, No artifi cial fl avors, No preservatives, or Provides 100% of the daily value of 10 essential vitamins and minerals ” resonate among consumers?

Silo 5: Benefi ts

The cereal category is often driven by slogans or by images that the phrases conjure up. There are “ benefi ts ” to the consumer. We tested ideas such as “ Great for a late night snack; A mid - day snack that will hold you over until your next meal; and An alternative to lunch. ”

Category 6: Brands

With more and more brands appearing on the shelves each year, we selected a mix of some of the top - selling brands to specialty brands to measure the overall infl u- ence of the impact brand plays in purchase.

From “ Germs of Ideas ” to Composing Elements

A question that often arises is “ How do we get elements? After all, we are not professional copywriters. How should we know what to say? Isn ’ t that the job of a pro- fessional? ” To deal with the issue of “ writing elements, ” we went to the Internet for assistance and looked up cereal websites of leading manufacturers to fi nd mean- ingful elements to best fi t in these six aforementioned categories. We placed what struck us as relevant ele- ments into judgmentally the appropriate categories. The fi nal set of elements appears in Table 10.1 . We will talk about how to get these elements, how to test them, and what the data look like. For right now, just look at Table 10.1 to see the 36 different elements that we developed for this cereal test.

Getting People to Participate in Interviews

When the Internet fi rst began in the late 1990s, it seemed that the supply of participants for a study was virtually almost inexhaustible. In fact, Dennis Gonier, then CEO of Digital Marketing Services, Division of AOL, coined the phrase “ stream of respondents, ” almost reminiscent of a stream fi lled with fi sh. In those early, pioneering days it was simple to put out a notice of a “ survey, ” and get dozens of people to participate.

A lot has happened in 10 years. It ’ s harder to get people to participate. The novelty of Internet - based surveys has worn off. To get our panels, we sent out an e - mail that told them a little about the study and offered them a chance to win money in a sweepstakes. Prizes are the norm for today, and this study is no different.

Most researchers who do these types of studies now work with so - called Internet panel providers (i.e., com- panies that specialize in getting panelists to participate). We did as well. The participants were to be between the ages of 18 and 65, who had purchased and eaten cereal in the past three months. They had to be primary house- hold grocery shoppers and could not work in certain industries such as marketing research, advertising agen- cies, or cereal - marketing companies.

When the panelist received the email, all that was necessary to participate was to click on the embedded link in the survey, or paste the link into the browser. The panelist was directed immediately to the “ welcome page, ” shown in Figure 10.1 . Welcome pages are exactly what you might think they are — pages that tell the panel- ist what the study is about, what the rules are, and of course, what the prizes are. As in most research, the less said about the study the better. In that way we don ’ t bias the respondent. To this end we kept the introduction fairly simple. Rather than telling the respondent about cereals in general, we simply said, “ We are interested in your opinions about cereal. ” The respondents were then told they would evaluate concepts and would rate each

Parenthetically, such “ competitive analysis ” is often the best way to jump - start one of these exercises. The competitive frame often provides great examples of ideas, both in word and in picture. Thumb through a dozen or so websites in a product category and you will defi nitely come away with many new ideas.

Table 10.1 Getting the language right. The table shows six silos of cereal elements, each silo having six elements or options. The elements are shown in rank order according to the performance among the total panel of 446 respondents.

Data from the total panel of 446 respondents Total C3 Low fat, only 1 g fat per serving − 2 C5 Use as part of your points system − 3 Silo #4: Nutrients D5 Provides 100% of the daily value of 10 essential

vitamins and minerals

2

D4 Contains essential omega - 3 fatty acids, which may reduce your risk of heart disease

1

D3 Full of antioxidants and phytonutrients that help you to maintain your heart health

1

D6 Helps you maintain a healthy lifestyle 0 D2 All natural, no artifi cial fl avors, no preservatives − 1 D1 100% organic − 2 Silo #5: Benefi ts E6 Fills that empty spot in you, any time of the day 1 E1 A quick and easy breakfast 0 E4 Great for a late night snack − 1 E2 A midday snack that holds me over until my next

meal

− 2

E3 A wonderful alternative to lunch − 2 E5 A food you feel good about feeding your family − 3 Silo #6: Brands F4 Made by Quaker 2 F5 From your local supermarket 2 F2 Made by General Mills 0 F3 Made by Post − 1 F1 Made by Kashi − 4 F6 From your local specialty/gourmet store − 8 Data from the total panel of 446 respondents Total

Additive constant 41 Silo #1: Texture A4 The crunchy texture of thick fl akes and big clusters

of nuts

3

A6 Crunchy cereal that never gets soggy in milk 2 A5 A crunchy rice and oat clusters cereal 1 A2 Crunchy on the outside fi lled with soft, melt - in - your -

mouth fi lling

0

A1 The thin, light and crispy texture of your favorite fl akes

− 1

A3 Hearty, dense texture of only the fi nest ingredients − 2 Silo #2: Flavor B1 Plain and simple, made with brown sugar and

cinnamon for a traditional taste

3

B4 Made with imported dried fruits that plump up nice and juicy when adding milk

2

B6 Enjoy the simple combinations of apples and cinnamon

2

B5 The old time favorite Honey Nut 0 B2 Now in Vanilla Bean and Milk Chocolate. An

indulgent cereal

0

B3 For the sophisticated taste buds … fl avored with Hazelnut, Amaretto and Kahlua

− 4

Silo #3: Ingredients C2 Made with whole grain, a good source of fi ber,

important in reducing your risk of chronic diseases like stroke and diabetes

6

C1 Only 100 calories of wholesome goodness per serving

3

C6 Helps you lose weight the safe, healthy way 3 C4 Low in sugar 0

Figure 10.1 The welcome page for the cereal study.

A Look at the results — What Should We Say?

Our analysis relates the presence/absence of the 36 ele- ments to the individual respondent ’ s ratings. But before we did the analysis, we looked at the rating for each concept, and followed the conventions of market research:

1. We divided the 9 - point scale into two locations, to represent accept or reject.

2. A rating of 7, 8, or 9 represented “ accept ” the concept (i.e., would buy the cereal). We coded that acceptance as 100.

3. A rating of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 represented “ reject ” the concept (i.e., would not buy the cereal). We coded that rejection as 0.

4. The specifi c “ cut - point ” (i.e., 1 – 6, 7 – 9) was arbitrary. We had used this cut point many times before, and found it to work in terms of predicting real world behavior. So, we used it again here.

5. Each concept tested by each person was thus recoded, with the rating on the 9 - point scale replaced by the binary, 0 or 100.

concept on a simple 9 - point scale: “ How likely would you be to purchase this cereal? ” 1 = Not at all likely, 9 = Very Likely.

What Test Concepts Look Like

Right now we ’ re dealing with text - based concepts, although most of the rest of this book will deal with graphics. Text - based concepts are fairly straightforward. The elements appear as “ bullets, ” or short stand - alone phrases, one stacked up on the other, as we see in Figure 10.2 . Quite often purists state, sometimes quite vehe- mently, that the concepts have to be written out in full paragraph form. Actually, the form that we see in Figure 10.2 does just fi ne. Panelists have no problem reacting to this type of disjunctive set of elements. They simply read it and respond, much as they would do for complete paragraphs. The only difference is that this format is quite a bit easier on the eyes and on the mind. Furthermore, for research purposes, the format of concepts in Figure 10.2 is easy when one wants to work with new ideas. One need not spend hours trying to fi nd just that “ proper bridge ” to link two ideas. The respondent ’ s mind does all the work.