Packaging: past, present & future

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

• For decades and decades, packaging was supposed to be the last stretch of the CPG shopping experience.
• Packaging had the tough task of closing the deal during that last, millisecond-long moment of truth at the supermarket aisle.
• Clinch the sale.
• Cap the consumer journey.
• Every advertising execution was supposed to show a prominent “pack shot”.
• Possibly due to territorial jealousy, in the advertising world package design was and is looked down on.
• I know ad execs who believe package design is a lesser art, a distant poor cousin of the monarch of marketing (that’d be advertising).
• Did I say territorial jealousy?
• I meant bumbling cluelessness with suicidal tendencies.
• Madison Avenue gives package design the cold shoulder at its own risk.
• Another sign of how increasingly adept at shooting itself in the foot the ad world has become.
• Or so methinks
• No new news there.
• Whatev.
• Apart from selling its content, packaging has another obvious role: protecting the product.
• A mantra American manufacturers and retailers take quite seriously.
• When I moved to America I was surprised by the amount of trash I took out every night.
• It was mostly discarded packaging.
• Cereal and detergent boxes, tetra paks™, shrink wrapping, thermal sealing, cans, cans and more cans, bottles and containers of every size, shape, color and material imaginable.
• Aluminum, glass, cardboard, paper, plastic, PET.
• Family size, party size, travel size.
• With lotsa real estate to include labeling, vivid imagery, colorful logos, copy, charts, UPC numbers & bar codes.
• They are called consumer PACKAGED goods for a reason.
• No wonder America produces close to 40% of the solid waste of the planet.
• With barely 4.4% of its population.
• The United States, China, Brazil, Japan and Germany are the leading trash generators. The US produced about 228 million tons of waste in 2006, a figure that climbed to 254 tons by 2013. China (with a population around four times larger than that of the U.S.) is close behind, with 190 million tons of waste per year.*
• We must do something about this prodigious amount of waste if we don’t want to end up buried in it.
• At this pace we will all be living on a landfill before we know it.
• Plus, 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”.
• To be continued next week.

*Source: http://www.latimes.com/world/global-development/la-fg-global-trash-20160422-20160421-snap-htmlstory.html