Many food brand owners believe that having a delicious product is enough. However, a customer standing in front of a supermarket shelf cannot taste your product. They can only look, for a few seconds, among thousands of choices.
In this article · 4 sections
Three seconds before the shelf
Mr. A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter and Gamble, referred to the three to five seconds moment when customers see the product on the shelf as the "first moment of truth." In that moment, it is the packaging, not the advertising, that captures attention and decides whether the customer picks up the product.
A supermarket has over thirty thousand items, and customers' eyes may not even scan two-thirds of the displayed labels. Packaging that looks fine on a design screen can get lost when placed next to competitors in real life. According to a survey by Ipsos, the majority of buyers say that packaging design often influences their decisions.
Why "imitating competitors for safety" is a death sentence
To play it safe, many brands follow the industry's conventional path, producing packaging that looks like their competitors instead of standing out. However, the marketing science from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows the opposite: buyers choose what is easy to recognize and remember. The task of identity is not to prove differentiation, but to make the brand stand out enough to pop into the customer's mind at the right moment. Packaging that looks exactly like everything around it is invisible.
Modernize your packaging, and lose loyal customers.
On the flip side, refreshing packaging can be risky if done incorrectly. In 2009, Tropicana changed all its orange juice packaging at once, removing the iconic image of an orange with a straw, which had been a long-standing identity asset. Customers skimmed past and no longer recognized the product they had trusted. Sales plummeted within two months, and the company had to revert to the old packaging. The lesson: when refreshing, keep the assets that customers use to recognize you, and change gradually rather than all at once.
After the scandal, customers only trust what they can see.
In Vietnam, there is an additional layer: trust. After a series of food safety scandals, customers have entered a phase where they only trust what they can see with their own eyes. According to a survey by iPOS and Nestlé, when choosing a restaurant, customers prioritize cleanliness and safety certifications over advertising claims. For brands, this means that transparency and visible trust signals have become part of the identity, not just compliance.
Sinh Vũ builds food identities to achieve three goals simultaneously: to be recognized in one second on the shelf, to maintain distinctive assets over time, and to emit the trust signals that customers need to see before believing in the flavor.