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Pack Test: Drive impact with powerful packaging design 

Create packaging that gets noticed, communicates clearly, and persuades consumers to choose your brand. Pack Test combines behavioral, visual, implicit, and direct consumer feedback to help you screen, validate, and optimize packaging throughout the design journey.

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What makes packaging powerful?

Pack Test evaluates three critical areas of packaging performance, helping you understand where your design is working and where there is room to improve. 

Visibility 

Does your pack stand out, get noticed, and remain easy to find on shelf? 

Communication

Does it clearly convey your brand, variant, benefits, and intended positioning? 

Persuasion

Does it create appeal, build value, and encourage consumers to choose your product?

Testing for every stage of packaging development

From early-stage concepts to final shelf validation, Pack Test gives you the flexibility to choose the level of testing that fits your design and decision-making needs. 

Screen early ideas

Identify the most promising designs and understand their strengths and weaknesses. 

Validate in context

See how new packaging performs in realistic shelf environments alongside competitors. 

Optimize before launch 

Use detailed feedback to refine design elements, strengthen communication, and reduce risk before going to market. 

Put your packaging to the test

See how your packaging performs in context

Pack Test combines realistic virtual shopping environments with behavioral, visual, implicit, and attitudinal techniques to build a more complete picture of design performance.

Understand how easily shoppers notice and find your pack, how quickly they recognize the brand and variant, which design elements attract attention, what associations the design creates, and how it influences choice.

Benchmark your packaging against current designs, competitors, and norms

Understand how your design compares with your current pack, key competitors, and Toluna’s benchmark database. Pack Test combines these comparisons with granular design feedback, helping teams identify what to protect, what to improve, and where there are opportunities to strengthen future designs. For ongoing programs, learnings can also be built across studies to support broader best-practice guidance and stronger packaging decisions over time. 

FAQs

Pack Test is Toluna’s packaging research solution for screening, validating, and optimizing packaging designs throughout the development journey. It combines consumer feedback with behavioral, visual, and implicit techniques to understand whether packaging gets noticed, communicates effectively, and persuades shoppers to choose your product. 

Yes. Pack Test uses realistic virtual shopping environments to understand how packaging performs in a competitive shelf context. Depending on the testing approach, it can measure whether shoppers see and engage with your pack, how easily they can find it, and how quickly they recognize the brand and variant, helping you understand whether a design will stand out without sacrificing shopability. 

Yes. Pack Test combines simulated shopping behavior with measures such as design appeal, purchase intent, product benefit perceptions, and preference to understand how packaging influences shopper response and choice. Shelf validation can also measure purchasing behavior within a virtual store, helping assess whether a new design strengthens or weakens performance in context. 

Yes. Pack Test can use visual attention and diagnostic techniques to understand which elements shoppers notice, the order in which they are seen, and which specific aspects of a design consumers like or dislike. This granular feedback helps identify elements to protect, change, or optimize before launch. 

Yes. Pack Test offers benchmarking against your current packaging, key competitors, and Toluna’s packaging benchmark database of more than 12,000 cases. This helps you understand whether a new design represents an improvement, how it performs within its competitive context, and where there may be opportunities to strengthen it further. 

Pack Test can support decisions from early design screening through to final shelf validation. Early in development, it can help identify the most promising designs and provide direction for optimization. Later, designs can be tested in realistic shelf environments to validate visibility, communication, findability, and their ability to persuade shoppers before launch. 

Toluna’s virtual shelf approach simulates real shopping behavior by allowing consumers to browse and shop within realistic virtual environments rather than simply react to a static shelf image. Toluna has conducted parallel validation comparing its online virtual shelf and visual attention techniques with central location testing using life-size shelf environments and eye tracking, with the approaches producing comparable shelf and visual-attention results. 

Ready to make your packaging work harder? 

Get the insight you need to create packaging that stands out, communicates effectively, and drives stronger consumer choice.