This blog post was updated in August 2026 to reflect the most recent information, data, and insights available at the time of publication.
As anyone who has undertaken a collective creative pursuit can tell you, nothing is perfect on the first try. Often it takes many attempts—and a lot of discussion, dissection, and diligence—before you arrive at a result you’re all proud of. As the author and design thinker John Spencer put it, “Creativity is more about iteration than inspiration.”
This is certainly true with packaging design, whether you’re developing a new design or improving your current one. The questions become: How should you iterate? And how will you know whether each iteration moves you toward an effective design that can drive brand growth?
As a brand, you might ask those questions of your creative team or agency. But with consumers making critical decisions within the first few seconds of viewing a product, the answers must be driven by actionable consumer insights.
Traditional design research usually offers either-or, yes-or-no answers that offer virtually no insight or hints at how a design can be improved. They may tell you which design performs best with consumers (albeit with subpar results), but not why—and perhaps more importantly, which parts of the design are working and which aren’t.
This is why Designalytics developed a system for design-driven brand growth—providing deep diagnostics, both quantitative and qualitative, to help you target opportunities for improvement.
Here are four key areas where design performance data can support creatives in taking your CPG design to the next level.
Design diagnostics on each element of a design
Design is a holistic discipline, but it’s important to understand when certain parts of a package design aren’t contributing and why. For example: If consumers are consistently noting that an important piece of copy is illegible, a raisin looks like an ant, or a mascot is not making the expected impression, that’s important for a creative team to know. Having precise consumer feedback allows creatives to address specific issues and can spark ideas for how to address them.
Getting rich qualitative and quantitative feedback on each element of the design helps designers refine things like the hierarchy of communication, claims, layout, imagery, and more.
Communication of decision-driving attributes
If there were a piece of advice we could share with brands embarking on a redesign, it would likely be this: Say important things better. Apart from our proprietary purchase conversion metric (which is our most predictive), effective communication has the highest correlation to sales success. In fact, there is an 88% correlation between communication and directional in-market outcomes.
In other words, if you don’t communicate well, your new design is already at a tremendous disadvantage. By providing data that shows where your communication can be improved (and where you might be doing better than competitors), you’ll set your creative team—and your brand—up for success.
Consumer associations and sentiment
Objective data should be the bedrock upon which a design is built, but sometimes off-the-cuff consumer reactions can offer valuable insights.
During our testing, Designalytics captures spontaneous associations, asking consumers to share the first words that come to mind when they view a design. These immediate reactions reveal instinctual and emotional “system 1” thinking (popularized by Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking book on human psychology, Thinking Fast and Slow), and tie directly into building a brand's mental availability. This information, combined with robust data, paints a more complete picture for creatives on how consumers are reacting to a design… and how it can improve.
The "why" behind consumer preference
It sounds obvious, but when searching for the reasons consumers prefer a given design, it’s helpful to actually ask them.
In addition to measuring consumer purchase preference (with the most predictive metric in the industry), we also ask respondents to provide open-ended feedback about why they'd be more likely to purchase one design over another. This qualitative data can be invaluable for creatives as they refine package designs.
Like all good teams, creatives will do their best with what they have. Giving your creative team the precise, actionable information they need is the most effective way to produce high-performing designs that lead to brand growth.
Ready to elevate your packaging design with data-driven consumer insights? Request a demo to see firsthand the difference the right data can make.
