Arrange Products in a Visual Pattern

How should you arrange products on shelves?

Ideally, match the typical usage:

• Shampoo then conditioner.
• Toothpaste then floss.
• Detergent then dryer sheets.

Customers encounter these sequences in daily life, so these arrangements "feel right."

But what if your products don't follow a sequence of usage?

Just add any visual pattern, such as color saturation (e.g., from dull to bright). A recent study confirmed this effect with hats, shirts, and lipstick (Huang et al., 2022).

But any pattern can work. Even slogans are preferred in alphabetical order (e.g., Bufferil Eases Pain; King & Auschaitrakul, 2020).

Why It Works

• Something Feels Right. Customers blame the product instead of the pattern.
• Gestalt Grouping. Humans group stimuli that look similar to each other. A row of sequenced colors will seem like one large unit (which grabs attention).

How to Apply

• Get Brighter From Left to Right. Especially if customers read from left to right (Huang et al., 2022).
• Get Darker From Top to Bottom. Dark stimuli look heavy, so they should sink to the bottom (Huang et al., 2022).
• Splice Images. Kashi designed their cereal packaging so that spliced images would merge with adjacent packages.

I captured the following photo in 2019, but I noticed that Kashi stopped this strategy. Maybe it backfired in ecommerce. Or maybe the reason was unrelated.

• Huang, Y., Yang, L., & Liu, M. (2022). How to display products available in multiple color saturation: Fit between saturation and position. Psychology & Marketing, 39(4), 809-819.
• King, D., & Auschaitrakul, S. (2020). Symbolic sequence effects on consumers’ judgments of truth for brand claims. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 30(2), 304-313.