Know what it feels like: combine qual imagination with quant precision for successful pack development

Combining the distinct insights from qual and quant in pack testing is challenging, but essential to successful outcomes, according to William Landell Mills, founder of Amaranth Insight.

In the final instalment of a three-part series on best practice in pack development, he reveals how some companies change their packs without doing qual on the assumption that quant gives them the necessary results but is not a great idea: while quant tells you the scores, it does not describe the unique feeling of the design. And it is the feeling of the design that plays in people’s heads. This feeling is fundamentally what needs to be nurtured and enhanced when evolving a pack.

Scoring sculptures

Here’s a thought experiment. In a previous article, I described how packs are like small domestic sculptures, transmitting their implicit messages silently over time, and how that persistent low intensity message is the secret of their power. Now, imagine going around Tate Britain using a quant pack test to evaluate each of the sculptures. You would get some fabulous findings (and someone should definitely do this). But that exercise would not tell you the holistic emotional meaning of the design. To do that, you would need to talk to the visitors and the curator, and perhaps get them to do some collages. The qual and quant combined would then paint the full picture.

The structure behind the feelings

Knowing ‘what it feels like’ is the fundamental insight for packaged goods. Even if you know all the data points, if you don’t know what a pack evokes, you cannot properly advise on how to optimise it. Optimisation is essentially about amplifying the holistic feel of the design. The feeling doesn’t come out of the blue. It is generated by the unique chemistry between its cultural ingredients. For example, the pyramid shape of the 1800 bottle might evoke an Aztec temple, yet the gothic fonts carry the imprint of colonial Spain. It is that combination that generates the mysterious, authoritative feel of the design. Future evolution of the pack must respect that chemistry, which can only be captured by qual.

Clash of methods takes you deeper

Integrating qual and quant is a delicate collaboration between holistic subjectivity and atomised objectivity. When we compare results from the two, we sometimes find worrying gaps between them. But these gaps are in fact windows into deeper reality. When we get over the initial angst at an apparent inconsistency and we work to find out what is going on, it leads to deeper insight. The qual and the quant experts have to work harder to see what their shared data is really saying. But the resultant insight can be truly penetrating.

Digital versus real stimulus

The other issue is that stimulus is often different in the qual and quant. For reasons of efficiency, much quant packaging research is done online. The packs are shown on a flat screen, with a clean, clinical perfection. Even when the design is shown rotating on its axis to give a 3D view, it is not the same as the real thing. When we have three dimensional mock-ups, we get a more realistic sense of how light bounces off the surface. This can mean that a texture that looks woven and organic in online quant, can seem like shiny polystyrene when seen in the flesh. Colours vary too, on and off-line. The weight and hand feel of the real thing cannot be replicated online. Yet, we do absolutely need the numbers on how fast it can be found, which part of the label pops first and what are the frequency of target attributes are all proofs of actual performance. The insights from real and the digital stimulus need to be integrated.

Qual happens, whether you commission it or not

Even when quant is commissioned without qual, the quant has to be interpreted. Hypotheses will be given that will relate faithfully to the data. However, those hypotheses will be unconsciously framed by the implicit qualitative sense of the overall feeling of the design amongst the researchers. These instincts might be very sound. But it is clearly better to use a method that is explicitly designed to identify the holistic feeling of the pack through formal qual research.

What good qual looks like

Qual isn’t there to replicate the quant. It doesn’t need to identify how much the pack stands out, what aspect catches the eye first, or indeed how much people like it. The quant measures all those things precisely. The critical role of the qual is to identify the implicit narrative the pack conveys, as this is what triggers emotion and therefore performance of the pack at a market level.

Free flowing spontaneous descriptions of the pack are useful in revealing the language consumers choose to use, but we need to go further. This is why the use of projective techniques is so important to qual. The most frequent is personification: building a story of the pack coming to life as a person, their style, their values. Collages and drawing exercises can serve the same purpose, accessing non rational response.

A projective technique is a game which tasks the consumers to project their unconscious emotional reaction through a metaphor that draws on the consumer’s imagination. The imagination is the access point to their unconscious processing. Consumers interpret the pack through their unconscious, connecting it to existing memory structures, to address the imaginative task (saying that the pack is a like a Jokey Shoreditch hipster, say). The metaphors they use to do this tell you what cultural meaning and emotional evocations the design carries.

Some argue that using a projective technique primes exaggerated processing. This is true but it misses the point. The purpose of quant is indeed to replicate naturalistic processing in store. The role of qual is to unearth the pack’s implicit meaning. Of course, if you ask consumers to say, top of head, what a pack represents, they will not be aware of its narrative. But the implicit meaning is at work nonetheless at a mass level as people interact with it in society. One can only access this narrative through projection.

The clear understanding of what qual and quant deliver allows each to do its job properly and focuses us on the fact that it is by working to combine the two that we get to understand the bigger picture and give the best possible advice.