Sales Performance of Packaging for Consumer Electronics Products

The retail landscape for consumer electronics (CE) products has changed dramatically in the last two decades. Small independent retailers have made way for large retailers, selling CE goods in a supermarket way. Products are in their packaging on the shelf, to be grabbed by consumers in a self-service environment with a minimum of sales assistants available to provide advice. In such an environment the packaging has to make the product competitive. Taking the analogy with supermarkets further, the packaging may even try to trigger impulse purchases. To achieve this goal packaging for CE goods is increasingly becoming bigger, more colorful, and shinier. This is both costly and environmentally unfriendly. Therefore it is relevant to study impulse buying of CE goods in order to allow for design optimization, so that packages do not become bigger and shinier than necessary. To study the extent to which impulse buying really plays a role for CE products a survey was held (N=295) first asking people about planned purchases and a month later asking about actual purchases and the reasons for these purchases. The results from this survey show that impulse buying has become a significant factor in selling CE goods. Furthermore it gives some clue fo