Packaging: past, present & future. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

  • When a “fresh off the boat” Cuban arrives in Miami, one of the first rites of passage his or her friends and family put them through is “the supermarket experience”: visiting an American grocery store aisle for the first time.
  • Some of them hyperventilate.
  • A few have been known to drop on their knees and start sobbing.
  • I kid you not.
  • Imagine what an individual who grew up and lived all of his or her life in the most wretched scarcity feels when confronted with the cornucopia of capitalism: sensory overload taken to 11.
  • An out of body experience.
  • On another note, anyone who’s traveled across Latin America knows that it is not uncommon for store owners at various retail outlets (bodegas, pulperías, changarros and assorted variations of what ‘murica knows as a c-store) to serve sodas in a ziplock bag with a straw.
  • Because?
  • Simple math: this way the owner can hold on to the original glass bottle and return it to the bottler, hence saving the store and the customer a few cents.
  • It’s called the free market economy.
  • Now then, what will happen to disciplines such as package design, trade & shopper marketing when we stop buying our groceries off shelves at a grocery store?
  • Hey, it is not a question of “if” but “when”.
  • It is quite obvious to the naked eye that the way we think packaging these days needs to evolve and adapt to the user experience of the Instacarts and Amazon Primes of this world.
  • “Contents may have settled during transit.”
  • There’s some experiments out there already, to wit.
  • As of late, many big retailers of consumer electronics -and even of some perishables too- are having plenty headaches caused by their customers’ nasty habit of “showrooming”.
  • Don’t know what “showrooming” means?
  • You probably do it all the time: it is the practice of visiting a brick&mortar store to check out physical products, say, mobile phones, and then proceeding to buy them online at a lower price.
  • There are apps for this.
  • Some large retailers with leverage have tried to inoculate themselves against this phenomenon by demanding customized packaging designs and different SKU numbers from manufacturers, different from the same products sold online.
  • The logic being that this way consumers will be confused -or misled- come time to compare apples to apples.
  • Or samsungs to samsungs.
  • Methinks these are just band aids.
  • These attempts at protecting the status quo are barely postponing the day of reckoning.
  • Just buying time (pun intended).
  • In the age of Amazon Prime there’s no turning back.
  • To be continued next week.

 

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