Design and Consumer Psychology of Color Box Printing

Whether a product can have good sales performance must be tested by the market. Throughout the entire marketing process, color box packaging plays an extremely important role. It communicates with consumers using its unique image language to influence their first emotions and generate interest in the products it packages at the first sight. It can both promote success and lead to failure, and packaging without showcasing power will sweep consumers away. With the continuous development and improvement of China's market economy, consumers have become increasingly mature and rational, and the market has gradually revealed the characteristics of a "buyer's market". This not only increases the difficulty of product marketing, but also brings unprecedented challenges to packaging design, driving product packaging to grasp the consumer psychology of the public and develop towards a more scientific and high-level direction.



Packaging with color boxes has become the main behavior of market sales in actual commercial activities, which inevitably has a close relationship with the psychological activities of consumers. As a packaging designer, if they do not understand consumer psychology, they will fall into blindness. How to attract consumers' attention, and how to further stimulate their interest and induce them to take the ultimate purchasing behavior, all of which must involve knowledge of consumer psychology. Therefore, studying consumer psychology and changes is an important component of packaging design. Only by mastering and reasonably applying the laws of consumer psychology can we effectively improve design quality, increase product added value, and improve sales efficiency.



Consumer psychology research shows that consumers have complex psychological activities before and after purchasing goods, and differences in age, gender, occupation, ethnicity, cultural level, social environment, and many other aspects divide them into many different consumer groups and their different psychological characteristics. According to the survey results of the China Social Survey Institute (SSIC) on the consumer psychology of the general public in recent years, the characteristics of consumer psychology can be generally summarized into the following types:


1. A pragmatic mindset. The main psychological characteristic of most consumers in the consumption process is a pragmatic mentality, believing that the actual utility of the product is the most important. They hope that the product is easy to use, cheap and high-quality, and do not deliberately pursue aesthetic appearance and novel style. The consumer groups with a pragmatic mentality are mainly mature consumers, working class, housewives, and elderly consumer groups.


2. The mentality of seeking beauty. Consumers with a certain level of affordability generally have a mentality of seeking beauty, emphasizing the appearance and external packaging of the product, and paying more attention to the artistic value of the product. The consumer group with a desire for beauty is mainly young people and the intellectual class, and the proportion of women in this group is as high as 75.3%. In terms of product categories, packaging for jewelry, cosmetics, clothing, handicrafts, and gifts needs to pay more attention to the expression of aesthetic value psychology.


3. The mentality of seeking differences. The consumer group with a desire for diversity is mainly young people under the age of 35. This type of consumer group believes that the style of the product and packaging is extremely important, emphasizing novelty, uniqueness, and individuality. They require the packaging to be more fashionable and avant-garde in terms of shape, color, graphics, etc., but do not pay much attention to the value and price of the product. In this consumer group, underage children account for a considerable proportion, and for them, sometimes the packaging of the product is more important than the product itself. For this group of consumers that cannot be ignored, their packaging design should highlight the characteristics of "novelty" to meet their psychological needs of seeking differences.


4. Conformity psychology. Consumers with a herd mentality are willing to cater to popular trends or imitate the style of celebrities. This type of consumer group has a large age range, as the strong promotion of fashion and celebrities by various media promotes the formation of this psychological behavior. Therefore, packaging design should grasp the trend of fashion or directly introduce product image spokespersons that are deeply loved by consumers, in order to improve the credibility of the product.


5. Naming psychology. Regardless of the consumer group, there is a certain sense of seeking fame, valuing the brand of the product, and having a sense of trust and loyalty to well-known brands. When economic conditions permit, even insisting on subscribing despite the high price of the product. Therefore, establishing a good brand image in packaging design is the key to successful product sales through color box printing.


In short, consumers' psychology is complex and rarely maintain a single orientation for a long time. In most cases, it is possible to combine two or more psychological requirements. The pursuit of psychological diversity drives the packaging of product color boxes to present equally diverse design styles.