Green at heart: Sustainability through innovative packaging design: Wednesday 10th February 2010

Within food and drink the importance of packaging cannot be stressed. It needs to communicate and resonate with customers, increase the brands awareness levels and ultimately drive sales. Above all a new design should make a statement and strive to strengthen the brands identity or should the need arise change its identity.

This week’s edition of The Grocer focuses on how packaging revamps help to distinguish a brands identity and ultimately drive sales but it also notes the increasing importance of green credentials in any new packaging development.

Here at The Oxford Research Agency we are increasingly finding that recent pack designs are placing an emphasis on improving a brands green credentials.

In its article The Grocer highlighted the important role packaging plays in engaging a consumer.

There are brands whose packaging has become iconic from their pack design; from Coca Cola to Cadbury through to more recent start-up brands such as Innocent or Gu where strong packaging credentials, as well as a winning product led to rapid success.

Changing pack design is fraught with opportunities as well as potential pitfalls if the new design fails to engage with a customer. Classic brands will rarely go for radical makeovers and changes will tend to be more subtle whilst other brands, particularly those who are struggling for their place in the market will undergo a radical overhaul in an attempt to win over the competition. The greater the changes in the pack design the higher the risks!

Packaging needs to:

• Clearly communicate the products proposition
• Engage, entice and grab the customer’s attention
• Lead the way within its category
• Look at new ways of using the product (if required)
• Be practical from a production and customer usage perspective
• And nowadays address its environmental impact.

Improving your brands environmental standing through a new pack design can take many formats and apart from driving the brand and satisfying green credentials can also have other benefits including reduced production and transport costs.

Recently we have seen the introduction of cartons replacing traditional canned products such as Sainsbury’s baked beans and Asda’s premium tomatoes and Dairy Crests’ Jugit pouches for milk which removed 70% of plastic packaging weight. In early January Asda launched the trail of their self-dispensing refill scheme that allows customers to reuse and refill pouches of concentrated fabric conditioner in stores. Large numbers of drink manufacturers have been reducing the weight of glass bottles, introducing plastic bottles or reducing the weight of cans in an effort to be both green as well as save on costs.

Other brands such as Dorset cereals will also be associated with not just a winning pack design, which distinguished itself from the competition when they first launched, but that they also featured green packaging credentials.

Packaging research considerations:
Apart from tackling your green credentials at your brands next packaging review remember there are also a number of important considerations when considering research:

1. Does your pack still maintain its advantage over the competitive set?
2. How should it evolve to ensure customer buy in is maintained?
3. It’s not important to test whether your new design is significantly more liked than your current design in a head-to-head test, after all, they will never be seen together on the shelf.
4. Ensure you measure Real Standout and Real Speed of Find in a totally unbiased and unprompted route.
5. Ensure the packaging supports the proposition, and make sure the brand equity is measured, identified and improved to ensure you take your brand forward and boost sales. 
6. Make sure your packaging excites the customer and fits your brand.
7. Make sure your packaging communicates the brand with your consumers whenever it is seen in store.Note, consumers are not pack designers. Research has to be designed to carefully measure consumers’ appeal of the design and not for them to design it.

Qualitative/quantitative solution:
Remember, whilst consumers have an increasingly green outlook with packaging, pack design is also filled with emotion! Qualitative research is vital to tap into this emotion which is why we increasingly offer an integrated qualitative and quantitative approach to addressing packaging research.
 

Here at The Oxford Research Agency we work with our qualitative division, Mimosa to gain a qualitative understanding. By using varied and creative qualitative methodologies we are able to see exactly how and why people react to and with proposed new pack formats against the competition. We are also able to identify what you have to do to ensure your design appeals to the consumer to ensure buy in.
Combined with our latest quantitative packaging research techniques, including a fully integrated volumetrics approach to enable you to test multiple designs and identify the volume this will deliver, we can help provide you with standout, brand equity and character diagnostics that link to real sales, as well as meeting your brands green credentials.

A proven track record of highly satisfied qual-quant clients...
To find out more about what the unique combination of The Oxford Research Agency and Mimosa can offer you for your green packaging research, please contact:

Emma Bearpark or Sunita Bhabra, Associate Directors at Mimosa (emmab@mimosa-qual.com / sunitab@mimosa-qual.com; 01865 20 84 03; www.mimosa-qual.com)

John Whittaker, Marketing Manager at The Oxford Research Agency (john.whittaker@tora.co.uk; 01865 72 82 72; www.tora.co.uk)