Mark Changizi’s Alien Vision Revolution

Hello!

This is my first post for Shopper Insights in Action! It’s a pleasure to share my takeaways with you!

This morning, Mark Changizi’s keynote blew me away and I’m sure those in the audience would agree with me! He told us at the outset that once we understand what our perceptions are about, it can change applications of how we package and present product to the consumer. In effect, we can better steer the consumer once we understand how they “see” items in a retail environment.

Changizi’s comments covered three things: color, forward facing eyes and illusion and gave us implications for packaging and display based on what he’s discovered in his research as a cognitive neuroscientist.

Color: Interestingly, we learned today that as our sense of smell diminished during evolution, our sense of discerning color has improved. Color affects our emotions, our moods and our health. Consequently, color has significant impact on how we perceive packaging, displays, marketing — basically anything with color that touches a product will impact our perceptions of it. So, it’s not something that we can take lightly.

Forward Facing Eyes. Humans have forward facing eyes whereas many other mammals don’t. The audience went through an interesting exercise of covering one eye (while still open) with one hand. What happened wasn’t half sight. Rather, it was the “perception” that the hand covering our eye was semi transparent so that we could still “see” with both eyes. Hard to believe at first but wildly interesting concept. What this means is that we can handle depth of what Changizi calls “clutter” versus breadth of clutter. If we consider how our grocery aisles are set up today, they are not set up for forward facing eyes… Maybe this calls for a shift for how aisles and shelves are build and products are displayed?

Illusion. We learned today that our vision isn’t bad so much as our brains are slow in processing certain types of graphics. We saw a number of different graphic designs that “appeared’ curved or even bulging but actually weren’t. These type of graphical stimuli are ideal objects to put on our packaging and our displays. Though they are static images, they will be dynamically perceived. Our eyes will be attracted to it and because our brains are slow in processing what we see, we’ll become even more attracted — almost like a loop of sorts.

All in all – very positive, thought provoking approach to how we can use our unique qualities and apply them to packaging and display. I’d like to hear your thoughts? Please send me an email at
678Partners@gmail.com or let’s tweet chat. I’m @parissab! I’ll be writing more posts about the other sessions I attended today. Stay tuned!

Best,

Parissa Behnia
Idea Chef
678 Partners