How important is wine packaging for consumers? On the reliability of measuring attribute importance with direct vebal versus indirect visual methods

摘要: Wine packaging design has received a growing research interest in the last few years. Nevertheless different approaches to measure the relative importance of packaging compared to other extrinsic cues like brand name, origin and price yield deviating results. Verbal methods directly asking consumers about wine packaging relevance usually result in low packaging importance ratings contradictory to what we know from the market place. We review previous research in the measurement of packaging attribute importance and discuss psychological differences found between direct verbal and indirect visual methods. We compare the results of two methods to measure wine attribute importance: a direct verbal Best Worst Scaling (BWS) experiment versus an indirect visual discrete choice experiment (DCE). With BWS all visual extrinsic cues are not only measured as less important than verbal cues but also show a smaller variance between respondents, signalling a strong respondent agreement on their non-importance. Contrary, the DCE combining label and packaging attributes in wine bottle graphics in a shelf-like setting reveals a higher average importance and strong consumer preference heterogeneity of wine packaging design attributes and levels.Our results imply that stimuli which are visually perceived by consumers cannot be reliably measured with verbal methods. This results in strongly biased results. Choice experiments with packaging graphics, which simulate consumers’ real purchase behaviour in front of the shelf are a powerful tool for marketing practitioners. It allows them to efficiently measure the relative importance of design …