Should Business Blog Posts Come in Transparent Packaging?

I love “reading around” for this Say It For You blog – I learn so many useful tidbits about so many different everyday things. Listen to this one, from the American Marketing Association Journal:  When food is packaged in transparent wrappings, two very interesting things tend to happen, as Ohio State University marketing professors Xiaoyan Deng amd Raji Srinivasan discovered.

First of all, when the food in the package is visible, that tends to increase buying, the researchers found.  They called that the “salience effect”. No mystery here–customers know exactly what they’ll be getting when they open the package. Seeing is believing that it’s time to buy stuff, at least when it comes to food, apparently.

Transparent packaging has an “opposing” effect when it comes to food consumption, the professors found.  The transparent package enables consumption monitoring. In other words, customers now had the food home and could see how much they still had left in the package. That tended to make them "save" more and consume less.

Some of these insights about food packaging can be applied, I think, in our work as blog content writers.

 First of all, an increasing number of eyeballs are scanning our blog “packages”. 61% of global Internet users research products online, with 44% of online shoppers beginning the process using a search engine. Let’s think of the post’s title and opening lines of the blog post (the things that appear on Google or other search page) as the “packaging”.

The reader takes the next step in the “consumption” process by clicking on a selection on the search engine page, meaning the title of the blog post. Like transparent packaging on a food item, the title must make clear what readers can expect to find in the article.

One of the main motivators for having a marketing blog in the first place is to “get found” by the ‘right people, meaning those already interested in what you have to sell, what you know, and what you know how to do, and who need confirmation that they’ve come to the right place.

All they need to do now is open the packaging and begin consuming all the information and guidance you have to offer!