I recently spent 16 hours inside Walmart watching people shop.
I wasn’t there conducting formal research. I was there because I was curious. After years of helping brands understand how they show up in the world, I wanted to get closer to the moment we’re all designing for — when someone actually encounters a product and decides whether or not it’s for them.
We have more data than ever about how people shop, what they value and what influences their decisions. All of that is incredibly useful. But there’s something different about seeing those decisions happen in real time. And after 16 hours of watching them happen, I found myself questioning some of the assumptions we make about how much attention people are actually giving brands.
Class Trip to Walmart
As an industry, we spend enormous amounts of time thinking about the consumer decision: what people value, what will capture their attention, what message will persuade them and what will make them choose one product over another.
Meanwhile, the actual shopper is trying to remember what they came in for. They’re checking a list. Looking at prices. Answering a text. Navigating around another cart. Trying to get home. Your package — the one a team may have spent months debating, designing and perfecting — might get a few seconds of their attention.
And increasingly, the person standing in front of it might not be the consumer at all.
Today’s Shopping Environment Leaves Little Room for Deliberation
In a perfect world, customers have plenty of time to consider all the available product options. In reality, they’re rapidly scanning shelves while holding a child, checking a shopping list and answering a text, eyeing the time as school pick-up nears. That context matters.
Traditional research provides valuable information about consumer preferences and habits, but observation offers more nuanced insights. The ability to see what actually happens when busy people are distractedly navigating a crowded supermarket is invaluable. That’s why getting into the field is part of the job at STONE. Everyone on our team is expected to spend time actively investigating physical retail environments. We need to understand not only the consumer, but the ecosystem in which our work has to perform — what surrounds a product, what competes for attention and what clarity actually looks like in context.
Consumers typically spend less than 6 seconds making in-store selections. In that environment, the abundant choices brands often view as opportunity can quickly become decision fatigue. At some point, comparison stops and a split-second decision takes over. Brand leaders must consider what happens when consumers don’t have the time or desire to scrutinize packaging claims.
We might spend months perfecting a package, debating which benefit deserves prominence and tweaking color palettes. But if the shopper can only give us seconds, whatever we’ve decided matters most has to work within those constraints. If the primary message fails in that micro-moment, months of work may go unseen.
Familiarity’s Role in Earning a Purchase is Changing
Historically, decision fatigue worked in an established brand’s favor. When faced with too many choices and too little time, consumers could default to what they recognized. However, familiarity doesn’t carry quite the same power it once did. Assumptions traditionally associated with established brands — such as familiar names automatically signaling superior quality, efficacy or taste — don’t necessarily hold true across different generations.
Younger consumers, particularly Gen Z, have grown up in a market where emerging CPG and direct-to-consumer brands appear alongside legacy names everywhere they shop. They’re used to discovering new brands through social media, creators and digital platforms, and they’re often more willing to experiment.
Retailers are responding to that appetite for discovery, too. Target, for example, is placing greater emphasis on newness across its assortment, including a mix of owned, emerging and national brands, while prioritizing initiatives to help shoppers discover what’s new. As retailers continue to make discovery part of the shopping experience, unfamiliarity isn’t necessarily the disadvantage it once was.
That creates an interesting tension. While shoppers are more inclined than ever to choose something unfamiliar, brands have less time than ever to communicate why that unfamiliar offering deserves attention. And they have to communicate it across an expanding number of environments with differing parameters.
Brands must now ensure their product makes sense on a crowded Walmart shelf, in retailer search results, on a grocery app and within a tiny thumbnail image. The physical shelf remains critical, with 90% of total grocery sales still happening in-store. At the same time, more than 90% of consumers also shop online, using apps, store websites, e-commerce platforms and delivery services. This trend underscores the need for brands to help facilitate a seamless omnichannel experience, rather than relying on recognition alone to close a sale.
The Rise of the Invisible Shopper
One of the most interesting things I noticed during my 16-hour Walmart observation was how difficult it has become to define who, exactly, the “shopper” is. The crowds moving through the aisles were peppered with fulfillment associates or third-party shoppers selecting products on someone else’s behalf. Many of Walmart’s actual customers weren’t in the store at all.
That shift has significant implications for brands because shoppers now encounter the same product in starkly different ways. A consumer standing in an aisle can pick up a package, turn it around, compare its size to the product beside it and get a feel for the category’s broader visual language. A digital shopper may see little more than a product name, price and thumbnail. And someone fulfilling another person’s order may be looking primarily for the visual or verbal cues that signify they’ve found the correct item.
Designers need to create packaging that appeals to three subsets — the consumer scanning shelves, the online shopper assessing brands on a screen, and the person selecting items on someone else’s behalf. This challenge will only become more important as the digital and AI-assisted shopping space grows. As retailers enhance their online platforms and increasingly incorporate AI assistants into the process, the market is projected to reach $7,55 million by 2033.
Brands that design exclusively for the traditional shelf experience are designing for only one version of modern retail.
Breaking Through Requires Clarity of Both Product and Brand
Despite the seemingly complex nature of the current retail environment, it all boils down to simple clarity. If consumers have only seconds to make a decision, successful packaging shouldn’t make them work harder. It should reduce friction.
When considering an item, a shopper should immediately be able to understand what the product is, what it does for them, and why they should choose it. But that clarity shouldn’t stop at the product level. Brands also need to clearly communicate who they are, what they stand for and why someone should choose them, not just one of their products.
That’s the balance between product positioning and brand positioning. Product positioning communicates functional value, while brand positioning creates connection, meaning, differentiation and trust. Neither can do all the work alone.
A beautiful brand story won’t help a consumer who can’t figure out what a product does. Conversely, clear product communication without a distinctive brand proposition can make an item easy to understand but equally easy to substitute. The strongest brands accomplish both, and they do it in the environments where decisions actually happen — which is why it’s dangerous to evaluate packaging or positioning solely on a white page.
A design that looks perfectly clear in an isolated presentation may not work when it’s next to 20 competitors. To ensure it does, CPG professionals must consider whether:
- The label hierarchy is still effective
- The most important message remains clear
- The brand is recognizable — in person and as a thumbnail image
- The product appears in retailer search results
- The product still differentiates in the competitive set
On a shelf or in a digital app, clarity has to survive context.
The Shelf Makes Strategy Honest
I didn’t walk away from Walmart believing brands should abandon traditional consumer research. What consumers tell us matters. Surveys, focus groups and data can help us understand what people value, what they want and how they think. But there are some things you can only understand by watching what actually happens.
Because nobody shops in a research deck.
They shop while checking a list, answering a text, wrangling a kid or racing the clock. They encounter your brand alongside dozens of others, not perfectly isolated on a white page. Sometimes they encounter it as a package they can pick up and turn around. Sometimes it’s a one-inch image on a screen. Increasingly, they may not encounter it at all — someone else, or something else, is doing the shopping for them.
That context has a way of exposing what matters. The shelf has a way of making your strategy very honest. Can people find you? Do they know what you are? Is what matters most immediately clear? And once they understand the product, is there enough of you there to make choosing it matter?
Finding Clarity in the Aisles
Clarity isn’t about stripping a brand down until there’s nothing left. It’s about knowing what has to come through — and having the conviction to protect it. The brands most capable of breaking through know two things exceptionally well: their consumers and themselves. Neither can be fully understood from a conference room.
So go look. Walk the aisles. Stand in front of the shelf. Search for your product online. Look at it as a thumbnail. Watch what people reach for and what they pass by. Pay attention to what gets noticed, what gets confused and what disappears entirely. Then look at your own brand in the middle of all of it.
Sixteen hours inside Walmart didn’t give me all the answers. It gave me better questions. And in a retail environment that keeps getting more complicated, I think that’s a pretty good place to start.
Emily Wolf is Executive Creative Director & Co-Founder of STONE Strategy & Design, where she helps emerging challengers and established household names turn consumer insights into brand strategies and creative experiences that drive growth. With more than 20 years of experience across 100+ brands, she specializes in understanding what brands need at critical moments of growth and change — from sharpening positioning and evolving identity to creating packaging and experiences built to perform from shelf to screen. Her experience spans some of the world’s most recognized brands, including Starbucks, PepsiCo and General Mills, alongside the next generation of category challengers, including GoNanas, Wild Planet, Carbe Diem and Laird Superfood. At the center of her practice is a simple belief: the strongest brands know who they are, who they’re for and have the conviction to make both unmistakably clear.
