A recent study has revealed about marketing tactics deployed by cereals' manufacturers to attract your attention. The study, conducted by Cornell University's Food, found that designing of characters on cereal boxes and their positioning on shelves makes a big difference to consumers.

It was found that those boxes have characters intentionally designed to have a straight-on look. The designing of such characters on cereal products is based on the belief that direct contact gives rise to trust of people for the products. It was found during the study that people are likely to trust cereals more when the characters on the box are looking right at them. And probably that's the reason they buy them more.

So it is the eye effect that significantly contributes to successful marketing of cereal brands to adults and kids. Consumers are 16% more likely to trust a brand of cereal when the characters on the box have a straight look on them to establish an eye-to-eye contact. Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab and the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity came to this conclusion after assessing cereal characters and eye contact from 65 brands of cereal on shelves of 10 different grocery stores in New York and Connecticut.

The researchers allowed a standard distance between shoppers and the cereal shelf of 4 feet. After that, they measured the angle at which 86 different cereal characters were looking at shoppers. It was found that target customers are attracted through incidental eye contact by cereal characters marketed toward children and those geared toward adults.

Of 86 different cereal characters, 57 were having a different cereal characters so as to attract the attention of kids. Also, it was discovered that positioning of kids' cereals is marinated at the same height as of kids.

Brian Wansink, Director of Cornell's Food and Brand Lab, says, "If you are a cereal company looking to market healthy cereals to kids, use spokes-characters that make eye contact with children to create brand loyalty".