Research Summaries

In order to understand brand color variation in corrugated packaging, samples of seven different consumer brand packages were collected from retailers in 11 locations across the United States. These samples were tagged by location and then organized by brand. While core brand colors are often utilized across all variety of the brand, frequently these are part of a larger palette of packaging colors: for example the diaper brand Huggies® has one consistent brand color across the different product variations, these product variations are informally known as Stock Keeping Units, or SKUs. After tagging and organizing, the packages were sorted with the goal of the researchers better understanding what colors were common across all packages, as well as those colors that are used across the majority of the samples received. The testing of color variation was performed using an X-Rite eXact™ SpectroDensitometer. All colors measured for each individual package were averaged to create the data point for each measured color on the package. These are compared to a brand standard, when available. If a brand standard were not available, the standard was set as average of all packages.