Editor’s note: Scott Young is president of Perception Research Services, Fort Lee, N.J.

Marketers are increasingly recognizing the importance of packaging in influencing the many purchase decisions that are made at the point-of-sale. At the same time, companies are also recognizing the benefits of global packaging, which generally involves using a single packaging system, in which text can be translated into local languages.

However, marketers also face a minefield of challenges in developing and testing effective global packaging, given that competitors, retail environments and shoppers vary from market to market. With these challenges in mind, I’d like to offer five principles to help ensure that research studies are accurately gauging the impact of packaging systems. Later, I’ll also share several insights on effective global packaging gathered from our studies.

Principle #1: Don’t hold side-by-side “beauty contests”

Whether you are in Boston , Barcelona or Bangkok , the ultimate objective of any packaging system is to drive sales. Therefore, packaging studies must go beyond aesthetics (what people like) and instead focus on communication and persuasion (what people will buy).

However, poorly designed packaging studies can quickly descend into art directing rather than communication assessment. For this reason, the single most important principle of effective packaging research is monadic study design, in which each person sees/reacts to only one system - and findings are compared across “cells” (i.e., those who saw current packaging vs. those who saw proposed packaging). That’s because the primary objective of a packaging study should be to simulate the introduction of a new packaging system (to see how it impacts shoppers’ attitudes and behavior). In other words, the evaluation of packaging systems is not about preference, it is about influencing behavior.

When shoppers direct...