Designing effective packaging is a challenging business. Not only must you win over shoppers within seconds, but you must do so against the ever-evolving range of competitors on the shelves. Real science-based knowledge of how shoppers perceive packaging and make choices is a critical advantage for any brand with retail packaging.

I’ve taken a look at what new research has been published in the past couple of years in the world of package design and summarised the most relevant and interesting ones. Seven practical findings come through across the recent packaging research.

A growing share of the packaging attention battle now takes place digitally: thumbnail-sized images on a phone, inside a retailer app, in a scrolling social-media feed, or in a recommendation grid. This means that online packs must not only work fast but at a small size.

A study (ICOBI 2025)1 of almost 500 Gen Z e-commerce shoppers buying cosmetics shows the dominance of clear visuals over text. Visual design (colour, graphics, shape, materials) had a significant positive effect on impulse buying. Product information had no significant effect. Online, with a thumbnail and a couple of seconds, the overall look, or ‘gist’, becomes the deciding factor driving choice.

This is closer to app-icon design than to traditional packaging design. Small text, fine details, subtle typography, and low-contrast elements are all less visible and important at a smaller viewing scale. What survives are bold contrasts, simplified composition, strong figure-ground separation, and a distinctive silhouette.

A quick test is to shrink your design to thumbnail size and ask whether the brand logo and other distinctive visual assets, the dominant colour, and the basic silhouette are still recognisable. If so, then the design has a level of clarity that will give it an advantage.

For some time now there’s been a trend in packaging design toward greater simplicity and minimalism — sans-serif fronts, muted colour palettes, simplified logos, and lots of white space. Often this is associated with more premium brands.

In one sense this is good. It improves processing fluency: the ease with which shoppers can understand your pack. However, many brands have ended up looking very similar to each other. This convergence has been a problem for a while.

Hosseini and colleagues (Discover Applied Sciences, 2025)2 built a deep-learning model with two parts. The first predicts where attention will focus across any packaging image, regardless of what specific brand or content is in it. The second locates the brand’s logo in that same image. Combining the two reveals whether the logo sits in the high-attention regions of the design, and therefore whether its placement is optimal. 

They tested seven specific hypotheses and the strongest results were these: Central logo placement enhanced brand attention significantly more than other positions. Upper placements beat lower ones. Upper-left beat upper-right (probably because most of us start reading from the top-left). And, in their tested conditions, a red logo on a white pack scored higher on brand attention than other colour combinations. Of course, this doesn’t mean red-on-white is a universal law that all packs should follow. The lesson really is that the logo needs a clear contrast from its background to stand out.

Equally, Jafarnejad and colleagues (Journal of Sensory Studies, 2025)3 made the same point in a more direct way. They had 54 adults choose between liquid soap bottles. The bottles with greater perimeter (a more elaborate outline) and greater eccentricity (further from a perfect circle, like a tall, elongated shape) got more fixations and were chosen more often. Smooth, convex, perfectly round forms got less attention.

Both studies point in the same direction. Hosseini’s model identifies what draws the eye on a pack: contrasts, strong central focal points, and well-placed brand elements. Jafarnejad’s bottle experiment confirms it from the other end: perfectly smooth, perfectly round forms get ignored. The overall message is that consumers’ eyes are drawn to packs and branding that stand out from the visual norm. If your pack uses the same minimalist design language as everyone else’s in the category, none of you have anything to catch the eye, and none of you stand out. Sometimes you can have both simplicity and distinctiveness. However, the simplicity pendulum may have swung too far. It might be time for package designers to give up some simplicity in order to look different.

The combined implication of these first two sections is that pack designs need to be bold and iconic, to be clearer at a smaller size, but distinctive enough to stand out against the competition. This is admittedly one of the hardest problems to solve for any pack design, as the need for being clear at a small size must be balanced with the need to include all the necessary information. And the need to look different from the competition must be balanced against the need to look congruent with what people expect in the category and to be readily recognisable.

Researchers at Hunan University of Technology in China4 built a model that uses eye-tracking metrics to predict which packaging design people will prefer. With 30 students looking at shampoo packs, the model’s prediction explained about 70 percent of the variance in actual preference. They built the model first by showing them sets of simplified bottles in which each bottle in the set varied on only one feature (such as shape, colour, or image-to-text ratio), and the students rated each one on a Likert preference scale. Then they ran another experiment in which they tested the model by showing the same students more realistic shampoo bottle designs and running it again.

That study found that higher colour saturation, cool hues like teals and blue-greens, and rounded contours pulled more attention and got higher preference scores.

Of course, you could argue, just ask them which one they prefer, or, for a more sophisticated read, use Implicit or response-timed responses to each design. But what this research shows is that simple measures of attention can provide insight into which pack designs they prefer. You would almost certainly need to build a fresh model for different categories of product and/or different consumer groups. Nevertheless, this kind of modelling could be a useful technique.

Researchers at Bentley University in the US and Tampere University in Finland (Scientific Reports, 2025)5 ran a related study with chocolate. 36 adults evaluated boxes that varied on colour (white or purple), texture (smooth, raised dots, or embossed), scent (chocolate aroma present or absent), and unboxing mechanism. The three unboxing types were ‘Lift-Off’ (a standard removable lid), ‘Snail-Fold’ (interlocking panels that open in a spiral), and ‘Slide-and-Tilt’ (top panels that slide outward then tilt to form support legs).

There were three main findings. Firstly, the Snail-Fold scored higher than the simpler designs on attractiveness, price expectations, and willingness to pay. Secondly, adding a congruent chocolate scent to the room increased perceived luxury and purchase intent. Thirdly, and at odds with the second, scent also reduced overall liking and willingness to taste another piece. So the same olfactory cue that made the chocolate seem more luxurious and worth buying made the immediate sensory experience itself slightly less pleasant, possibly because pre-loading the room with chocolate aroma dulls the contrast effect when the chocolate actually arrives in the mouth.

Equally, colour and texture interacted: purple boxes with raised-dot textures evoked more admiration and pride; white boxes with embossed patterns scored higher on joy and desire. The overall point is that sensory cues need to pull in the same direction. If you’re considering subtle olfactory or tactile cues, like soft-touch matte, scent envelopes, or embossing, make sure they fit the rest of the design.

A 2026 review paper (Kozik-Kołodziej)6 compared 78 peer-reviewed studies on consumer attitudes to sustainable packaging published between 2019 and 2025. Design cues that signal ‘eco’ include use of only one material, earthy colour palettes, visible recycle icons in clean type, and transparency windows where they make sense. However, the choice of packaging material itself (kraft paper, exposed fibre, bioplastics, recycled content) is the most powerful sustainability cue at shelf.

Indeed, most studies in the review6 found that consumers were willing to pay a 10 to 20 percent premium for sustainably packaged goods, with the amount higher for FMCG categories like bottled water and cosmetics. Similarly, the Shorr Packaging 2025 survey of 2,016 US shoppers7 found that 90 percent are more likely to buy from a brand with eco-friendly packaging, and 43 percent said they’d pay extra for it. Younger shoppers were noticeably more willing.

Yet there is a catch: the say-do gap. Stated preferences are consistently higher than actual behaviour at shelf, and consumers are increasingly skeptical of greenwashing. Visual eco cues need backing from two sources to be trusted: real material choices (recyclable content, paper-based construction, single-material packs) and credible third-party certifications. Eco-design is close to becoming just the expected standard for packaging, at least in some markets. The harder test is whether it feels trustworthy to shoppers.

The most replicated finding in the packaging eye-tracking literature is also the simplest one. Shoppers fixate on what designers place centrally, in larger type, with bolder contrast. They ignore what is placed peripherally in small dense text. Indeed, Liu, Samsudin and Zou’s recent systematic review of 221 packaging studies8 highlights cognitive fluency, the ease with which consumers process on-pack information, as a key mechanism by which packaging design affects purchase intention. Visual prominence (font size, positional layout, salience) is one of the main levers that drives fluency.

For example, Souza and colleagues (Foods, 2025)9 showed it concretely in specialty coffee. They tracked 105 buyers in Brazil looking at coffee labels. Fixations clustered on sensory claims, origin and traceability, roast level, varietal, and the word ‘specialty’, all of which were placed centrally on the labels. Functional information like net weight, best-before dates, and contact details, mostly placed peripherally, was essentially ignored.

This pattern is most clear-cut in premium and provenance-driven categories like specialty coffee, wine, craft beer, and artisanal foods, where consumers come to the pack looking for quality cues. However, the general principle still applies: placement and visual hierarchy determine what gets attended to, regardless of what consumers say is important.

The implication is that what to make prominent is one of the most important decisions in a packaging brief. Yet many packs default to placing legally required information centrally and brand-distinctive information peripherally. They have the priorities backwards, according to this research. The question to ask is what shoppers in your category are actually trying to assess at first glance, and then to design the visual hierarchy around the answer.

The studies above are part of a broader pattern. The Liu, Samsudin and Zou review8 used bibliometric mapping (citation-network and shared-keyword analysis across many papers, used to identify thematic clusters and trends) across 221 packaging studies and identified five core themes shaping the field: the role of packaging in consumer decision-making, the visual and structural elements of packaging design, product expectations and evaluations induced by packaging, packaging information communication and processing, and environmental impact and sustainability. The shared direction across these themes is a methodological shift from focus groups and surveys to objective measurement.

In practice, three kinds of testing are becoming standard. Implicit-association and other response-time measures reveal the quick, automatic connections consumers form between a pack and a brand attribute, often before they are consciously aware of those connections. Eye-tracking shows where attention goes on a pack and which elements get processed in the first seconds of viewing. Computational saliency models predict where eyes will land from an image alone, useful for a quick read on a design before it ever reaches a person.

I don’t think any of these methods replace creative judgment. However, they give designers and clients an objective second opinion. Indeed, the shift looks like what happened in online advertising and UX a decade ago, when banner-ad creative testing moved from focus groups to clickthrough data and attention metrics. Packaging design without a measurement function will be at a disadvantage.

The overarching insight is that the brain is constantly predicting the product experience from the pack. A pack that grabs attention, sets up coherent expectations, and rewards a closer look is doing its job. One that looks premium but feels cheap, or signals natural but feels plastic, or one that places key features in unnoticed locations, is failing in advance.

1.  Iddamalgoda, I.K.N.A. and Weerasekara, W.M.T.K. (2025) ‘The impact of packaging visual design elements on impulse buying behavior in e-commerce: a study of cosmetic products’, 8th International Conference on Business Innovation (ICOBI 2025), NSBM Green University, Sri Lanka.

2.  Hosseini, A., Hooshanfar, K., Omrani, P., Toosi, R., Toosi, R., Ebrahimian, Z. and Akhaee, M.A. (2025) ‘Brand visibility in packaging: a deep learning approach for logo detection, saliency-map prediction, and logo placement analysis’, Discover Applied Sciences, 7, Article 537.

3.  Jafarnejad Shahri, M., Golbazi Mahdipour, A., Bonyadi Naeini, A., Koleini Mamaghani, N., Broumandi, N., Rahmani, A. and Sadeghi Naeini, H. (2025) ‘Eye-tracking study reveals the impact of packaging design on consumer behavior: a case study of liquid soap bottles’, Journal of Sensory Studies, 40, Article e70041.

4.  Xiao, Y., Fang, J., Zhang, H., Li, Q. and Zhang, Y. (2026) ‘Construction and analysis of a packaging design preference model using eye-tracking degree of preference’, Scientific Reports, 16, Article 6080.

5.  Xiao, S., Yu, L., Meng, Y., Raisamo, R. and Ziat, M. (2025) ‘Effects of multisensory packaging on taste perception, emotional responses, and willingness to pay for chocolate’, Scientific Reports, 15, Article 39085.

6.  Kozik-Kołodziej, N. (2026) ‘Consumer attitudes and perceptions toward sustainable packaging: a systematic literature review’, Sustainability, 18(3), Article 1235.

7.  Shorr Packaging (2025) The 2025 Sustainable Packaging Consumer Report. Survey of 2,016 US consumers, conducted November–December 2024.

8.  Liu, C., Samsudin, M.R. and Zou, Y. (2025) ‘The multidimensional impact of packaging design on purchase intention: a systematic hybrid review’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, Article 785.

9.  Souza, A.H.S., Passos, L.P., Amorim, K.A., Galdino, M., Guimarães, J.S., Freire, A.P., Nunes, C.A. and Pinheiro, A.C.M. (2025) ‘Which on-pack information drives a marketable specialty coffee label? Unfolding purchase intention and visual attention with eye tracking’, Foods, 14(24), Article 4235.