INTELLIGENT CPG: Packaging is the Future of Connected Marketing (Part I)
This article is the first in a 3-part deep dive into connected packaging: what it is, why it’s relevant, and what brands that expect to compete in the digital age need to do next.
Author, Mark Hewitt
Read the Series:
Part III: Targeting Connected Possibilities
A Connected, Transformative Landscape
It’s no secret that the way people interact with CPG brands is fundamentally
changing. They’re buying differently, turning to Amazon and other DTC platforms and trusting nothing (certainly not advertising) as much as peer reviews. They want personalized mobile experiences and digital content that speaks to them, and they fully expect to be able to buy now.
All of this is giving big headaches to brand marketers who are under pressure to build the strongest possible relationships with consumers whilst finding every conceivable efficiency in their operational budgets. The last 10 years made them positively gun-shy. It seemed every technology innovation only made their lives more complicated — and only more easily challenged by less traditional, more agile DTC competitors. Understandably, many aren’t sure where to start.
But brand marketing will always be about certain fundamentals: informing consumers a product exists, telling them about it, persuading them they’d like to have it, and shaping their perceptions of its value. Yes, life comes at you fast (and consumer demands come at you faster). But brands just need a new, timely, disruptive marketing platform that can favor rather than challenge CPG’s strengths.
Increasingly, it looks like the competitive breakthrough that CPG brand marketers are looking for — the next innovation that can help them outperform against their fundamentals in unprecedented fashion — is right in front of them. On the shelf. Ready to reinvent the moment people pick up and use their products.
Behold the Cresting Wave of Connected Experiences
What is connected packaging? Think of it less as a messaging delivery system than a doorway to an expanded brand world. While traditional labels are born (and stay) static, connected packages are just waiting to come to life. Each one is a brand canvas on the head of a pin.
Just take a look at this bold leap forward from Fanta. In an immersive and high-impact campaign, the brand used connected packaging to engage teens with “Takeover Fanta & Win,” a social media competition that proved addictive. Young consumers scanned their way to brand-owned photo filters and a series of fun digital games and experiences and participated in promos for the chance to win prizes. Anchoring the experience from beginning to end? Fanta-branded media like youth had never seen it before. A dimensionalized brand at play, Fanta engaged its next generation of brand champions with content and interactions that fit their lives and leisure.
The Opportunity for Lasting Engagement Within the First Connection
Packaging often remains neglected as a marketing channel, its potential reduced to communicating product attributes (“Look at the ripe red tomatoes in our sauce”) and offering lists: ingredients, promises, instructions. But that’s a mistake. At a time when connection matters, the basics of benefit communication are not enough.
Packaging is a highly efficient media channel. It’s targeted at a brand’s most valuable audience: the consumers who are buying their products. Just as importantly, it’s never been easier or more cost-efficient to embed incredible new technologies right there on the label. There may be nothing intelligent about a bar of soap, a package of peanuts, or any other consumable good. But by making products smart, brands can seize on a moment in the customer journey that’s currently unused and unconnected and — using packaging — open a gateway to relevant experiences and services.
Connectedness, after all, is what makes many DTC competitors so sticky with their shoppers and what makes returning to them feel so intuitive. Data flows inform ongoing vs. transactional engagement. And when a brand offers thoughtful conveniences and anticipates people’s needs, consumers welcome more frequent and substantive communication from them. Why wouldn’t they?
CPG’s challenge is to match or exceed this stickiness by leveraging its physical presence in consumers’ lives, and thanks to technology innovations, it absolutely can. Did you know it’s now possible to make a milk carton, for example, that can not only assess its own weight and tell the shopper when it’s empty but test its own freshness and warn them when it’s past its use-by date? Yes, Amazon can remind shoppers to reorder frequently used items. But packaging sensors can help people monitor their portion sizes. Communications can be that individualized and helpful at a product’s point of use.
Leaders in connected packaging clearly see the potential and are already using technology to meet consumers’ increasing desires for transparency, sustainability, brand purpose, and authenticity. People will continue to need reasons to update or even upscale themselves, and today, those reasons can evolve overnight. What a stroke of luck. There’s nothing more easily updateable than digital.
Through its packs, Kellogg’s now welcomes fans of Special K to an online health and wellness e-zine. Coca-Cola has been successfully using its Sip & Scan platform as a rewards program, providing exclusive content. As for beauty and fashion brands, they’re sharing details of product ingredients and their materials’ traceability. It’s all owned media — supplying vital, relevant information and entertainment.
The way consumers access these always-on resources is simple. Connected packaging starts with a printed or embedded code in the brand artwork (NFC, QR codes and visual recognition apps are common applications). The consumer uses a smartphone or tablet to scan (or tap) this code, triggering a convenient, connected journey that’s filled with content to enhance the experience of use — when brand/category users are the most engaged.
When a call to action, an incentive, or a value exchange feels personal and thoughtful, the consumer doesn’t feel targeted; they feel considered. There’s a clear value-add when his positive emotional connection is affirmed throughout the product’s lifecycle — at point of purchase, at point of use, and right through the conversion to repurchase.
Why Is Connected Packaging the Right Solution Now?
It’s easy for brands to view some digital options as shiny objects. They have a point, as no tool is as important as how we use it, and investments without clear strategy can lead nowhere. But strong indicators — from consumer openness to mobile engagement to their demands for brand transparency — point toward connected packaging as the next big disruptor with deep, mostly untapped potential.
Each prior innovation prepared CPG for this moment. Mass-produced packaging enabled brands to make their products look more desirable. Media advertising made them better-known. Mass distribution made them more available, and TV advertising made them emotionally attractive. The internet made products more knowable and “searchable” (spanning price/availability), and social media-fueled personal endorsements across peer groups.
Now, in an age when consumers expect lightning-fast responsiveness from every sort of brand, connected packaging presents itself as a remarkably wide-open channel. The most relevant moment imaginable — point of use — offers a thrilling new platform across which CPG can shape its own renaissance. At minimum, it can catch up to DTC. At maximum, it could plan to disrupt its own landscape over the long term, to its advantage, redefining its role in the lives of consumers.
CPG’s Next Step: Building On Trends
To make the most of this moment, CPG brands must first expand their curiosity about consumers’ relationships with their wider world — as DTC brands have done so effectively. It’s vital to understand the big movements pointing toward connected packaging as the next great innovation in marketing. Specific consumer trends reveal people’s freshest expectations and can help CPG brands begin to identify their precise engagement opportunities.
We’ll explore the forces influencing today’s marketplace and consumer behaviors in Part II of this series — recognizing that for connected packaging to usher in a dynamic new era, CPG must commit to understanding consumers’ many complex, intersecting motivators. As if their brands depend on it.
Is your business facing a transformation? Let’s tackle the future together. You can find us at Bluedogdesign.com / info@bluedogdesign.com.
About IN THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS
IN THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS is an article series from Bluedog Design’s most creatively strategic minds, launched to engage the many challenges and emerging opportunities facing the business leaders of today and tomorrow.
About Bluedog Design
Bluedog partners with clients to apply principles of Design Thinking that strengthen their businesses — developing inventive growth strategies across brand identity and engagement, marketing, product lifecycles (prototyping through in-store activation), portfolio management, organizational structure and business operations.
