This is an exciting week for Behaviorally as we introduce the PackPower Score™, a simple one-number metric that predicts potential of packaging design to grow in-market sales of brands and products. Spoiler alert: sales lift attributed exclusively to packaging can be up to 5% within twelve months after a successful pack upgrade!
Further, this powerful metric not only pinpoints the potential sales impact of pack design change, but also allows for inclusion of competitive benchmarks in all work Behaviorally conducts to evaluate consumer response to new pack designs. We know this will prove valuable for our clients, allowing them to move forward (or not!) with added certainty about their own pack performance relative to specific competitors.
Moving forward, we will be embedding the PackPower Score across all physical and digital shelf solutions in Behaviorally’s product stack. This begins with our PackFlash® suite of pack evaluation tools, which provide quantitative and qualitative guidance for improving pack designs based on feedback across 42 behavioral diagnostics.
Our PackPower Score innovation represents a massive amount of creativity and attention to detail on behalf of many contributors and partners across our business, as well as invaluable contributions from clients who helped us road test it along the development roadmap. But more than that, the PackPower Score is significant as it manifests execution against a purposeful innovation strategy that will guide Behaviorally’s growth in the coming years: unlocking the potential of our extensive behavioral data assets with AI technology.
Market leading growth guidance and competitive benchmarking
The PackPower Score enables clients to isolate the potential for pack change to drive sales and realize the most important moment in marketing: the purchase transaction. It is built on three hugely important components that all work together: the world’s largest pack design database comprised of over 32 million behavioral datapoints across 42 diagnostic metrics, third party derived sales data, and the analytical power of AI, machine learning and computer vis+ion, trained to evaluate pack designs the way the human eye would see them.
Leveraging our expertise gained from decades of experience working with the world’s largest brands, we knew anecdotally that the majority of pack changes result only in small changes in consumer behavior at shelf, at least when taken in isolation from other POS and marketing initiatives. What we set out to create with the PackPower Score was a direct predictor of packaging impact that we could validate for reliability and scale cost effectively for clients. We wanted a tool that could predict the design elements most likely to drive incremental sales growth and conversely identify elements presenting downside risks of sales decline.
We torture tested the PackPower Score model during the development process, across our historical database of the tens of thousands of pack designs tested in the more than 80 consumer goods categories in which Behaviorally has worked globally. Modeling these scores against actual sales data, we were thrilled to see consistent metrics of pack potential, validating scores that for successful pack changes predicted more than a 5% lift in sales. Conversely, given human nature tends to keep failure top of mind, and specifically those packaging errors that make headlines and tank sales by introducing barriers to shopper choice, we were also pleased to evidence a similar amount of downside risk to sales with proposed pack design changes that are suboptimal.
Since products on shelves exist within an ecosystem of other choices, Behaviorally has and always will present new pack design options in full shelf context. But we also wanted to pinpoint the performance of packaging relative to specific competitors. Therefore, our additional goal with PackPower Score, and utilizing computer vision AI to predict survey data, was to complement our offer with a view comparing a proposed new design directly against competitor packs. This allows us to integrate competitive benchmarking into all analysis impacting the decision-making of our clients.
PackPower Score delivers against all these objectives. It will from today be added to every PackFlash study we conduct in our three-tiered stack of PackFlash Core, PackFlash Pus and PackFlash 360, for evaluating pack designs. Early in 2023, PackPower Score will be embedded in the rest of the Behaviorally product stack including our flagship ShopperLab™ solutions for qualitative exploration of pack structure and sensory diagnostics, as well as our Flash.PDP™ platform for evaluating visual assets that drive transactions at the digital shelf.
Unlocking the power of behavioral data with AI
As with many solutions that can be viewed as simple, what is behind it and what it took to build the PackPower Score is anything but.
Behaviorally have had behavioral science at our core since our inception. What we believe sets us apart from those agencies that claim to be behavioral experts is that we moved beyond academic theory a long time ago to focus on tangible executions that are actionable in commercial marketing decision making:
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We have done the hard work of boiling down the huge body of behavioral theory, building a simple framework of Benefits and Barriers, based on the work of academicians Roger Dooley and BJ Fogg among others, to stand as our foundational lens
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We invested in building out data assets that constitute indisputably the largest behavioral pack and shelf design database in the world, marrying them to sales data to provide concrete context for our predictive guidance
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We have invested in AI and computer vision tech that unlocks the predictive metrics with better precision and greater scale than any other measure in the marketplace: a powerful combination when paired with the expert interpretation of our team
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We have anticipated and adapted to the fundamental similarities and differences of the physical and digital shelf to create solutions that are not binary, but rather omnichannel in their ability to predict and influence shopper choice
If viewed through a lens of our history and our strategic choices, the PackPower Score is a clear example of our purposeful intention and commitment to leverage behavioral data through the power of AI and other advanced technology. This is our forward strategy for providing solutions that will drive real value to our clients, now and in the future. It places Behaviorally at the center of three exciting trends – behavioral datasets, increasing adoption of digital commerce platforms and AI.
Over time, we believe that the PackPower Score will become the behavioral metric that clients will see as foundational to pack design decisions and the path to increasing their ability to seize that single, and at times illusive, metric that really counts: the moment when the customer chooses your product, and a sale is transacted.
Please reach out to the Behaviorally Customer Success teams in your region to learn more about the PackPower Score, and how it can be leveraged to help you drive more valuable transactions at the moment of purchase. And please let us know what you think.
THE AUTHOR
Alex Hunt is a recognized pioneer in the practical application of behavioral science to shopper marketing in order to help clients develop consumer experiences that drive business growth. Prior to his role as CEO of Behaviorally, Alex served as global CEO of PRS IN VIVO, having joined the firm in October 2018.
Before joining PRS IN VIVO, Alex spent a decade building System1 Research (formerly BrainJuicer). Latterly, leading client-facing teams across 14 global offices as well as serving as an Executive Director of the System1 Group PLC Board.
