ABSTRACT
Consumer product packaging can serve a critical role in the consumption experience, but marketing and packaging
science researchers focus primarily on pre and post-consumption aspects of consumer product containers. Exhaustive
research into packing ergonomics, logistics, safety, sustainability and promotional features are common across
marketing and packaging disciplines, but research isolating the role of a packaging in consumption satisfaction and
enduring consumer-brand relationships is rare. In addition to an undervalued role in product satisfaction, functional
isolation between marketing and packaging scientists limits packaging’s overall impact on the bottom line.
This research examines the role of bottle quality in bottled-water consumption satisfaction and its subsequent
impact on brand attribute perceptions, consumer-brand relationship investment and behavioral intentions. We
show that thicker water bottles are perceived to be of higher quality than thinner bottles, and that these perceptual
differences impact how customers view a brand on aspects such as reliability and value offered by the brand’s
products and ultimately intentions to re-purchase the brand’s products.
We use qualitative, experimental and structural modeling analysis techniques to establish a fundamental role
of packaging quality in consumer product satisfaction. We show that packaging characteristics are an indivisible
component of the product and important to evaluation of the overall consumption experience. We finally
conclude that packaging quality has a critical role to play in building profitable consumer-brand relationships,
which should redefine the packaging cost-benefit