Packaging as a Marketing Tool: an Explorative Research in the Grappa Market.

This thesis aims to analyse in depth the role of packaging as a marketing and communication tool. In the current literature on the subject of packaging it is possible to discover its different functions and see that each different market presents its own specific declinations of the concept. For this reason, both the determinants of consumer choices and producers' strategies are influenced by packaging decisions. The dissertation investigates the role of packaging in various sectors, with a main focus in that of Grappa, where the importance of this factor for consumer behaviour is central. The aim is to develop a theoretical model of the communication process that will be applied to empirical research. To achieve this goal, the work will be conducted in two ways: - in-depth interviews with a Grappa producer, Distilleria Borgo Vecchio, to analyse how they encode a message through the packaging of their products; - an exploratory questionnaire to investigate how consumers decode the message of a package.