What the Eye Does Not Admire the Brain Does Not Desire: How Visual Properties of Product Packaging Affect Consumer Attention and Choice

Abstract

Consumer research explains how various visual properties of marketing stimuli, such as color or shape, individually, influence consumer attention and choice. It is not clear, however, how these various properties compete and combine to grab consumer attention. We draw on insights from visual and computational neuroscience to introduce the construct of visual importance of marketing stimuli as the combination of various visual features. In addition, we demonstrate how a neuroscience-based simulation of attention can be used to measure thus defined visual importance. We conduct an eye- tracking experiment in the point-of-purchase context to show that visual importance of marketing stimuli influences consumer attention and choice systematically, consistent with the underlying algorithms of how the brain codes and uses visual information.