In a consumer-oriented marketplace, the design and visual appeal of product packaging overrides it simply falling back upon utilitarian or pragmatic packaging. It has become more of an aid to influence and direct customer perceptions, choices, and purchases. Graphic design, the amalgamation of art and coding, plays a vital role in consumer attention, psychological response, and brand identity. These elements can aid consumers in being able to “typify certain product categories” (Franck Celhay and Jean François Trinquecoste, 2014, 1). This dissertation will explore the implementation of graphic design and its semiotics within product packaging, and the emotional influence this can achieve for audiences. It will delve into the relationship between graphic design elements, motives, coding, and cultural psychological impacts by looking at elements like colour, composition, hierarchy, layout, shape, and semiotics.
The significance of these relationships is not only relevant to the theoretical groundwork of design but is underpinned by the practicality within a business and its marketing. The initial impression that a product leaves on a consumer, and the emotional associations that can be evoked through convention, become the most important sales pitch for a product and its brand. The rationale behind this research is that understanding the symbiotic relationship between packaging graphic design and consumer responses, is a vital need for designers. It allows them to create designs that capture and are decoded by audiences. Dominant, opposed, and negotiated audience readings (Hall, 1997, np) of design will be explored in order to understand the relationship between the designer’s encoding and the audience’s decoding. The graphic design of a product is not only “emotionally evocative on its own” (Hutchinson, 2018, 12), but is also an extremely important critical channel for individual brand communication from company to customer. This is used frequently within the consumer marketplace industry, being an easy and effective tool for businesses to use to communicate their values and ideologies to widespread new audiences and their existing loyal customers. As these consumers encounter an ever-expanding array of products on store shelves, the visual appeal, “distinctive features” (Williams, 1960, 27), and design elements of packaging have become increasingly more crucial in capturing attention and driving purchase decisions.
PLEASE NOTE: You must be a member of the University of Lincoln to be able to view this dissertation. Please log in here.