EHI survey: Conflicting demands on packaging

 

The significance of packaging has risen considerably in recent years. Packaging is no longer just a means of protection or transport. It gains importance, on the one hand because of its potential to create efficient processes – from the manufacturing stage right onto the shelves – and, on the other, because of its increasing functionality as a marketing and communications tool.

The retail trade demands simple handling in order to optimise the work process, both in logistics and at the point of sale. Certainly, the requirements in the logistics chain and in the retail’s outlets are partly discordant. In logistics, optimal protection and transport capabilities, as well as a stable construction, are the decisive factors. At the point of sale, however, the packaging should allow for a sales-promoting, attractive goods presentation with a free view of the articles. Additionally, the independent retailers in particular are on the whole, for reasons of image, critical of the use of transport packaging on the shelves. Thus the retail industry can hardly agree on uniform criteria, a demand which the manufacturers who produce on a Europe-wide level make as a matter of urgency.
The customer-oriented design of the sales packaging also hides a number of areas of conflict. Because of the multitude of necessary information that has to be mentioned, packaging is becoming increasingly difficult to recognise for the customer.

The trend of the customers’ demand for small packaging units, environmental reasons and space problems in the retail shelves, clearly show that larger packaging units don’t offer a solution either. Also, the sales packaging should be well sealed in order to protect the product, as well as for reasons of hygiene, but at the same time it should be easy to open by the customer, without the need for any aids.

Environmentally-friendly packaging should use materials “as little as possible, but as much as necessary” to find the optimal balance on the field of tension between product protection, convincing marketing, legal requirements and environmental awareness. Such considerations have already led to considerable reductions in transport packing, while as far as primary packaging is concerned very often the marketing point of view, and therefore superabundance, still prevails.

Packaging survey 2008