Tis the season to think green! Wednesday 18th November 2009

Changing your pack design has also been shown to significantly increase sales by up to 30%, worth the same as spending £1.8m in advertising every year. With Government targets continually striving to minimise packaging and reduce packaging waste, now is the time to review the green credentials of your brand’s packaging.

According to the government agency WRAP (www.wrap.org.uk) six million tonnes of household packaging waste are dumped every year with 70% from grocery and if you want to make consumers feel green at Christmas its worth thinking about the following statistics:

• Over 800,000 tonnes of packaging waste will be sent to landfill this Christmas.
• Nearly 3,000 tonnes of aluminium foil will be used to wrap Christmas turkeys.
• In the UK we use about 83 km2 of Christmas wrapping paper.
• Around 125,000 tonnes of plastic packaging will be thrown away over Christmas - that's the equivalent weight of more than 50,000 polar bears!!
• One billion Christmas cards (17 for every man, woman and child) could end up in bins across the UK this year. One tree is needed to make about 3,000 cards.

Many manufacturers and retailers are now trying to ensure that packaging is now increasingly sustainable, recycled, less bulky, lighter and biodegradable.

Highlighted below are a number of other new packaging innovations which are being adopted, which are being used to satisfy green credentials, save on production costs as well as prove favourable with an increasingly green consumer.

Less Bulky: Reducing packaging is clearly evident as brands move from boxes to bags – seen with own label cereal ranges, or cartons to pouches as seen with milk. Dairy Crests’ Jugit pouches for milk removed 70% of plastic packaging weight.

Lighter: Manufacturers have been reducing the weight of glass bottles, introducing plastic bottles or reducing the weight of cans. Coca Cola have reduced the weight of bottles, whilst can weights have also been reduced by increasing the amount of recycled aluminium in cans. Britvic’s J20, Greene King, Grolsch, Adnams and Mars have all reduced bottle weights. Apart from being greener by reducing glass usage, their lighter weight also saves on CO2 emissions with lighter transport loads. Wine is a great example where the traditional glass bottle has been supplemented with plastic bottles, cans, tetra pack formats as well as the plastic pouch seen with the Arniston Bay brand.

Sustainability: Ensuring that paper packaging is from a sustainable resource and has the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) accreditation and focussing on sourcing from sustainable forestry schemes is one way forward.

Recycling: Recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate (rPET) in retail packaging applications is now being used by Coca Cola, Innocent and recently in the UK, Rachel’s yogurts.

Biodegradable: The latest technologies are also allowing biodegradable applications which are helping to replace our reliance on the need for paper and plastics.

Self-dispensers: This autumn Asda in association with Wrap have been trialling a new self-dispensing refill scheme that allows customers to reuse and refill pouches of concentrated fabric conditioner in stores.

Labelling: Wrap and the British Retail consortium (BRC) unveiled the on-pack recycling label scheme in June to help consumers recycle packaging as well as encourage local authorities to increase recycling rates. Apart from Morrisons the major supermarkets chains, 25 manufacturers and 2 merchandisers have all signed up.

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

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 forwards 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.
8. Remember, 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.

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. Mimosa, The Oxford Research Agency’s new qualitative division are able to provide you with in depth insight as to how your packaging works against the competition and what you have to do to ensure your design wins over the consumer.

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.

The Oxford Research Agency and Mimosa test innovation, from inception to launch, for 20 of the world’s biggest food and drink companies.

For expert guidance on monitoring your brands packaging needs contact Chris Sinclair or Andrew Tharme or call +44 (0)1865 728272 at The Oxford Research Agency. For qualitative understanding call Sunita, Emma or John on +44 (0)1865 20 84 03 or contact info@mimosa-qual.com.