Churn Prediction

CHAPTER I

* INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

When going shopping and looking for different products, what do we see? The packaging, On average it only takes ninety seconds of interaction with a product for a consumer to decide whether to purchase the product (Singh 2006). This means that marketers, designers, and advertisers have only ninety seconds to convince consumers that their product is the one that the consumer should choose to purchase. Within a product category different brands offer items for consumption which can be distinguished from the outside by the design of the packaging with regards to shape, size, color, etc. By looking at the packaging people do not know any further characteristics of the product, apart from the previous experiences. Due to increasing self-service and changing consumers’ lifestyle the interest in package as a tool of sales promotion and stimulator of impulsive buying behavior is growing increasingly. So package performs an important role in marketing communications, especially in the point of sale and could be treated as one of the most important factors influencing consumer’s purchase decision.

“Our understanding of good packaging is a package that sells”, concluded one Finnish consumer product manager, and package’s role as a sales clincher at the point of purchase cannot be underestimated. It will be soon 50 years when Pilditch (1961) wrote about the supermarkets’ silent salesmen and illustrated the marketing potential of consumer product packaging. Pilditch argued that package is the connecting link between company and consumer, and consumer’s purchase decision is dependent on the package. Pilditch’s basic argument seems to hold true even today although the ways how companies connect with consumers and the factors that determine consumer’s purchase decisions have changed.

There can be identified three main reasons why packaging has remained a topical concern of marketing and product decisions: First, given the...