Impact of Consumer Package Communication on Consumer Decision Making Process
Impact of Consumer Package Communication on Consumer Decision Making Process

Summary/Abstract: The change of traditional direct trade form to self-service form of trade has increased the product assortment in many groups of products. That has determined the intensified competition among brands and the wider application of marketing communication decisions. Because of plenty of brands it has become more difficult to identify them and make the decision. The bigger attention is attached to consumer package, which is integral part of product and its brand for the consumer. That transfers the information to consumer when he or she is active in communication process. Package, communicating with consumer in the selling place, has become essential factor influencing the choice of consumer. Scientific researches have proved that package decisions let to attract consumer attention, transfer the desirable information about the product, position the product in consumer conscious, differentiate and identify it among analogical products. In that way elements of package influence consumer decision making process and can determine the choice of consumer and the package itself can become the sustained competitive advantage. Thus despite of plenty of scientific researches, focused on separate functions of package and importance of its decisions, the package is not analysed as a whole, playing the communication function. Therefore this article is aiming to present the theoretical and empirical study which lets verify and name consumer package factors and their communication importance in the decision making process. The result of theoretical studies is the theoretical model of consumer package communication which illustrates the generalized communication of the package components and features and link between communication and decision making process. The model is verified by empirical research, while evaluating the influence of package components and features in stages of consumer decision making process and missing functions of package communication excluded in the model. Those functions would limit the possibility to estimate the total importance of the package components in stages of consumer decision making process. Seeking to ensure the results reliability, packages of products, which have the biggest influence on decision making process, have been chosen. Two main aspects of products have been selected, i.e., a) consumer is not involved in decision making process of these products; b) the assortment of products is wide and packages are very different. Thus products of casual demand are: milk, shampoo and chewing gum.

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