 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Contract Packaging Associates webinar titled Driving Consumer-Centric Packaging and Product Innovation. My name is Ron Puvek. I am the Managing Director of the Contract Packaging Association. Brian, would you advance? Thank you. Just a little bit about the Contract Packaging Association, but around since 1992, and we've been promoting the growth and welfare of our members throughout industry exposure and a variety of networking programs. The CPA members comprise the nation's largest and leading contract packages and manufacturers from all types of contract manufacturing and packaging functions for RANS and CPGs. The Contract Packaging Association serves the needs of the industry through continued education, market knowledge, and customer relationships. Next slide, please, Brian. Just a few factoids about the industry. This industry is growing at an extremely high rate. Since 11.9, actually our last survey said 12.2 over the last five years compounding on growth rate. We network and we have up to 10 events a year, and this webinar is a part of our education and networking program. So, let me just transition into the webinar. First of all, all of you are on mute. If you have any questions, please use the question box and we respond to as many questions as we can. You can also send us some feedback via electronic links, so be prepared for that. The webinar is being recorded and it will be posted on the CPA website at contractpackaging.org within a day. Today's presenters are Brian Wagner, who's the co-founder and vice president of PTIS-LLC, and Phil Ruse, CEO, Great Lakes GrowthWorks. I'm going to turn it over to Brian now, please. Brian, take it away. Great, thanks, Brian. So this is Brian Wagner, a little bit of an agenda, just an overview. I'll provide introductions, a little more detail on my friend Phil Ruse and I, who we are while we're here. And then talk about the relationship between packaging and the consumer, and then hopefully surprise some of the listeners with some of our experience and maybe how important packaging is beyond what we typically think about. Followed by some times and opportunities, and I'll be able to turn it over to Phil at that point. And then he will also talk about innovating with consumer today, as you know, the overall headline for this webinar is Transcending Disruption. And Phil and his team at Great Lakes GrowthWorks actually lead a lot of work around disruptive innovation and he'll be able to share a bit more on that. The best practices and some things that are being done differently and very effectively through the global pandemic and some methodologies that are being used online that I think will be helpful. And that's some closing thoughts with details on what it means for all of you. So first of all, a little bit about Phil, so I think it was about 20 years ago we met. We were in Kalamazoo, Michigan with Mike Richmond who some of you know and we co-founded PTIS and we were in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We were introduced to Phil Roos a couple hour drive away, I think it was a year before he started the Arbor Strategy Group and that led to a 20-year friendship and a lot of collaboration and eventually somewhere around 2009 or 2010. Phil sold the Arbor Strategy Group 2011, we sold PTIS and here we are now. We've got PTIS back and Phil started a new firm called Great Lake GrowthWorks and really have a lot of respect for him as a very intelligent person and just a good friend and a really solid human being so I think you'll enjoy hearing from Phil. So a bit on why we're here so we talked about disruption in the marketplace and we like doing a lot of work around foresight and looking forward and frankly this COVID thing is really disruptive things. The market has gone through a lot of changes but we're still looking forward to innovating and packaging and product innovation and differentiating brands through those influencing shoppers, driving growth, understanding the world around consumers and how they react, behave. We're going to talk a bit about observational research and how important that is to finding quite often unarticulated needs that we can solve through product and packaging innovation. The webinar is going to highlight trends so Phil is going to talk a bit about trends in the marketplace and again how we can leverage packaging and product innovation to innovate aligned with trends and work to really disrupt the marketplace as well. Phil will be presenting some approaches as I mentioned and I find that we're going to share out implications for you whether you're linked directly with the contract manufacturing and contract packaging industry and that's the CMCP that we referenced throughout the presentation for I know some of you are with brands, some of you are with supplier companies and hopefully this will resonate with all of you. So back in 1997 I joined the Kellogg company and I was really fortunate to have an opportunity to lead an innovation initiative starting with linking with the best of the best globally in terms of consumer insights specifically for packaging and I worked with a son-in-law of this gentleman Louis Cheskin and unfortunately never got to know him. He passed away in the early 80s but I subsequently have read all of his books and he wrote a number of books and he was just an incredible leader and coined the term sensation transference which is really about looking at a product or a package and forming judgments around the qualities of what's inside it, of how it's going to perform, how it's going to work and even in the case of packaging how it's going to taste and there's some great examples I mean you can see in the header that he helps create the Marlboro man and the Gerber baby he was responsible for the Tide box, the black swirl on the orange background and even launches of Ford Mustang and Lincoln Continentals all of which were great successes and all of which leveraged sensation transference so when you saw features and attributes of a design you connected that with how you expected the product was going to perform. One quick example really in the packaging world one of my favorites goes way back when probably people drank more brandy frankly but the leader in the area was E. and J. Gallo and they had the number one brandy Christian Brothers worked really hard to develop an equivalent or better brandy in terms of blind taste testing and then they put it in the bottle then they put it on the shelf and they couldn't get out of the bottom slot in the marketplace and they couldn't understand why and so Louis Cheskin got involved and he put the Christian Brothers brandy in the E&J bottle and by Tversa and sure enough the Christian Brothers brandy got better taste test results when you could see the package and when you could see the brand and then they started to strip away the features they took off the labels they did a number of different things and finally found out that the thing that made the big difference and I'm not sure these are the same bottles at the time but the thing that made the difference was the Christian Brothers brandy had a bottle that was more like a wine bottle which was perceived to be inferior to brandy in terms of the products and so they all they did is change the silhouette of the bottle went back to the same branding the same color and they took over the number one slot ahead of E&J Gallo so it's amazing that packaging amazing to me and a lot of people that packaging can have a huge influence on even the flavor of a product in terms of perceptions so Phil and I actually when we met he had he had just acquired or just started the Arbor Strategy Group and acquired a collection of what we called new and once new products and he he branded the collection as new product works and he acquired it from a mutual friend the late Bob McMath who was just an amazing guy and it started this collection something like 40 years earlier when you think about hundreds and thousands of products that are launched every year in fact it's been a tens of thousands launched every year in the United States some of the research shows that 90 or suggests that 90 fail within the first three years with some other research that says that most product life cycles are only three to five years long and we know that the contract packaging and manufacturing industry is is is playing such a huge role because the big brands can't afford to to build brick and mortar factories anymore and so being able to test and learn is such an important part of our our industry and the food and beverage and consumer product industries so a couple of these examples that come to mind and Bob McMath was on almost every major network he was on the Tonight Show he took these stories and they were they were so entertaining for people but Fritole lemonade was actually a product at the time it didn't last long in the marketplace excuse me Claire all launched a touch of yogurt shampoo people actually thought it was yogurt not shampoo and they thought they were supposed to eat it and your top top left your screen the wine and dine dinner was it was kind of a an elegant poultry-based hamburger helper and wine and dine dinner you you took these ingredients you knew mix them with the chicken and you cook them and people were perceiving that that wine was for drinking while you cook and in fact it was an ingredient intended to be part of the mix it also failed miserably Gerber singles on the bottom left Gerber did some great consumer insight research and they found that seniors had a need for food that wasn't all that different from baby food and they launched this product and unfortunately it failed because the product might have been great but there was an aura of being single and a senior and and also a baby food jar representing something other than what seniors wanted to be seen buying a lot more color to these these stories and there's thousands and thousands of them but kind of entertaining and kind of interesting that the big brands who should know what they're doing in terms of consumer insight frankly don't get it right that often and they seldom really understand packaging very well and therefore there's opportunities for some of you as leaders and and whether you're in a packaging department in a brand or you're with a supplier company or an OEM even or with a contract manufacturer if you really want to differentiate yourself there's an opportunity to take your new solutions and test them with consumers before you take them at the potential solution to the big brands so what's what's it all mean um obviously well obviously to me packaging is the product uh purchase decisions are made it's got shelf and something like 4.6 seconds i'm not sure what the research is for e-commerce and online but consumers make up their mind very quickly and in doing research it's really how you talk to them get at their needs understand attitudes and actual behaviors and observation is critical to packaging and i always talk about the need for creative people engineers marketing branding involving suppliers and research because we all see potential solutions very differently it's a it's a best practice not a lot of companies do it you also need to understand and test in context so um you can't just text in a sterile uh conference room you need to get into people's homes into their cars at their workplace with the places where they're using product to really get the best insights and then you need to recognize packaging is really integral to product development not an afterthought it's part of the brand it's part of the product and it needs to be prioritized as such with that i'm going to turn it over to phil roose my good friend and phil hopefully we got volume and you can take it over yeah this will be the moment of truth it's uh hi in the back this uh abjack can we stay going and and be able to connect to my phone despite a lot of tries so hopefully my guy's sounding okay you're breaking up a little bit but i can understand you okay i will talk so i'm going to talk a little bit about market trends and the role they play and then link that to how how that gets reflected in packaging and the importance of that and then kind of segue from there a little later on just talk a little bit about some ways that you can integrate consumers into the process enjoying some of this work so uh this is kind of a basic framework that probably doesn't sound too far into any of you but it's pretty central to the work our phone does i know the work uh by and the pts folks do which is the idea that if you're we have now in a world that's changing at warp speed and if you need to be reminded of that just reflect back on the last three or four months and they just seem like a whole new world that we need her to in that kind of a setting it's not enough we're going to talk about consumer insight but it's not enough to go talk to your consumers and figure out what their needs are we have to marry that with an understanding of a foresight where is the market or the way i would actually find that was how is my role going to change in the next three or four years because i think that's for most businesses uh everything's up and up for that our business models our customers and the way we do business so if we can bring together uh for a few of the future with a really deep understanding of people's needs and the insights for consumers then we've got to appear against what we can do so uh if you could flip ahead ryan i'm going to hard to have a a complete discussion about trends in a short webinar like this and i'm just going to i've laid up here on the slide a few of the kinds of natural uh dynamics that are affecting most of our businesses and i think these are pretty pretty common um and some of them are accelerated or have been changed in light of covid and so we'll talk about that a bit so this may be a somewhat familiar list of things that are on your mind and i think that the big one is an evolution of how people shop and we all know about e-commerce in general and the impact that's having uh but there are many dimensions to it uh there's friction lists or needs of being able to make a purchase that has big implications for packaging and product and the way it's designed to facilitate that um experiential uh aspect to shopping as well um people want more to buy more than a product in a package they want to experience them uh the whole direct to consumer and home delivery world was really revolutionized uh the businesses we're all in you better just tap tapping everything we do to one degree or another even if it's just how we order competition that we never knew existed people who are selling things that we might sell but they're selling them on the web or they're selling them in some other channel and it's just really opened up to be a tough thing to track that answer that question who's my real competition consumers who care that's really about uh people uh caring what their other brands respond to different situations and we see that right now with the Black Lives Man in protest we see it with COVID and the health risks uh but the way that a brand or a company review they bring to the world how they respond to the things going on the world around this is really important that people buy or don't buy based on that sustainability and we're all very familiar with that but that's assuming we're here to stand we're here to stay and constantly evolving and then brands as storage and I think that's got really profound implications for packaging because packaging in many cases may be the primary way that those stories get conveyed and we have to be conveyed in a simple way not with the willing words um so when we do this kind of work within some of the innovation work that we do we actually do something called disruptor analysis which is to look at some of these dynamics but in a very custom way for your industry because they are a little differently at different stations as we understand those we can really figure out where the opportunities to actually catch the wave of disruption and disruptor are going to be disrupted the last thing I'd say about this is that uh there are some potentially lasting impacts on this set of trends and the values that consumers have in light of COVID and seeing that we've been tracking doing a lot of consumer conversations with people of different cohort groups and there really are some things that seem like they may be sticking certainly increasing towards the product safety but also tried and true simplicity rather than quickness seems to be something that's sort of a general term where a copacologist announced that they're kind of pairing back a lot of their innovation pipeline to focus on sort of trusted brains and the bigger ideas. So if we start with that uh foresight then we have to match that with insight if we're going to get a view of where there are real opportunities and natural threats going forward. I was thinking about whether we resonate with consumers and it's not just the functional needs you know it's not going to break, it's easy to handle other those kinds of things but back to Mike's point about sensation transference there's a real emotional element here that on any of us in the packaging world when in an effort at Realize that we're trying to help express an emotional benefit that the product has but that can be conveyed and reinforced in the packaging whether it's about a sense of well-being or connectedness or feeling good about myself or just trying to convey an experience and a big part of the research that we often do to understand this is sort of mapping out the consumer journey. How do we get to making a purchase decision more of an influence and very much we are very often finding from that some important emotional drivers that need to be conveyed in whatever new products we're bringing to market. And lastly in this section I want to just give an example or two of packaging linking to consumer trends if they don't mind advancing that brand. So I think one of the best ones is up in the upper left hand corner and I'm going to how many of you are familiar with Loot but this is a zero waste platform a circular shopping platform where you can buy your favorite products but buy them in reusable package and they will deliver them to your door they'll pick you don't have to worry about recycling they'll take it away take away the empties afterwards and and clean them and make them possible for other people to enjoy a really kind of a way through platform that really makes a statement about that sustainability trend that I talked about but ends up interacting with people's lives in a really practical way and then there's some you know kind of more basic things like value you know the world of private label is playing there you see that the Walgreens brand next to the West Wing brand they look pretty similar don't they convenience and in a line offering that can be stackable or even single serve and I think that the tight example is a good one sort of showing the impact of different ways that people are shopping and that's a package that's designed entirely for e-commerce where there are different needs sort of going through that channel it may be meant to be avoiding needs of damage and have a little footprint and a variety of other things that are uniquely fit that channel and I think we're going to spend more and more importance in reflecting some of those big macro trends in terms of innovation in the market okay so this I'm just wrapping up this subsection just when we think about the importance of packaging you know as Ryan says the package is the product a lot of purchase decisions are made and perceptions are made through packaging as well as the product itself but we have to just keep in mind as we need to think about the broader world around us these disruptors or trends that are affecting us and then linking those to insights I'm going to talk more about insights now and then really reflecting that in the ultimate execution that we bring to market so I have one other topic and this is hopefully a bit juicy for all of you it's really highly actually advice talk about the importance of understanding the consumer of bringing them into the process and sometimes if you're a if you're a contract packaging company a contract manufacturer you may be delivered an idea that some development work has been has happened with consumer input but often the package itself hasn't really been integrated into that process and I just want to make the case that that's really important when we do it's important to do very early in the process because sometimes the packaging can be the thing that drives success or failure and it actually conveys all the wonderful things about it today and then I'm going to also give some encouragement to actually doing some of this work innovation first of all but then in bringing consumers into the process in an early stage and to do it now even though we're just emerging from lockdowns and we've got people working from home in a virtual environment but we get to very quickly in our practice pivot to doing all of the work that we often would do in a live setting to do it and yet completely but I mean I want to share a little bit of that learning and and that makes some suggestions about how to how to do that when you're going down in the process. So let's start with the early part of consumer research so this can certainly be done in person, focus groups, ethnographic research but we've there are online approaches to this that have been really proven they've been around for 10-15 years and constantly evolving and some of the things that we used to think we had to do live we're finding can be done quite effectively sometimes even better and more affordably through a virtual format. The tools of the training here there's the more somewhat more conventional approaches of focus groups and individual depth interviews which really are going to bring to life the voice of the customer in a way where you can actually see their reactions and see if they work at a product or a packaging institution or a conceptual idea drawing an illustration of such you can see which things kind of light up their faces and that's really important but I want to make a case for something Brian said earlier which is the importance of contextual resource research that's not done in the focus group realm but it's done in the real world of the consumer's life and the classic there is epigraphic or observational research where you're observing and interacting with consumers in their homes or when they're shopping and you're so you're being as much observed observing as you are actually asking them questions but there's a way to actually augment this with them doing some online blogging they can be connected to that where they're recording some of their behavior over time some of their observations some of their feelings as an example if you're developing a new snack innovation we're trying to figure out the right product execution the right benefits and the right packaging that will bring that to life having people record take pictures of record their thoughts diary what's going on in their lives every time they have the urge to have a snack and what's running through their mind what are the other options to give a sense of a frame of reference of other packaging and product options and the roles they play in people's lives it's figuring out where the gap is and where you can really stand out in that environment and then there's something else we've been using a lot of we call online insight communities where we actually recruit a group of people 15 20 30 people and we actually have them interact with each other through various exercises over time and sometimes we have them do individual activities and we bring them back together and we build ideas over time with them so we can start out by just asking about their needs and different insights into our lives but then we can bring real world executions of packaging or product to them and get their reactions and then ultimately sort of build them into a sort of such idea those last two are really contextual and have a big advantage in my mind and then I started almost trip on my lines here and what I just said here but there's a what if you've already developed the sense of an idea but now you want to really get to the idea of execution or make you working on a whole range of different ideas there's a whole consumer co-creation aspect of that that would now transfer all of our work in that space to an online format we use a combination of what we call online boards so it's basically a way that we work with a consumer or a set of consumers over time and give them a series of activities and often what we will start with is insights that we would have gathered in the first phase and the early stage of consumer work so these would be a set of statements accepted beliefs or statements about problems that consumers run into for which there might be a need for a new product to address so we might ask them to just prioritize those insights tell us which of the things that we're listing are the most important and take the most important lines and give them another exercise where we share a set of we call them trigger ideas for product and packaging and get their reactions to those and match them up to the insights and then gradually over time start to create more detailed graphical expressions of the proposition as well as on a page that we describe it and sometimes we even add a quantitative step we were doing a lot of this rapid quantitative testing almost what we call it lightning strike and that Brian's using that lot too in their practice where you can get a quick read on the idea and execution of package and in a matter of 24, 48, 72 hours you know what's working and what isn't and is it something that's likely to succeed in market so all of this is you might ask the question because many of us who do research sort of grew up on live research in person is it worth it to do online work and is it worth it to do it right now when we're selling the you know hopefully the trailing engines of COVID but I don't think it's going away completely for a while unfortunately and I think there's there are a number of reasons why this is a really affordable agile and very useful way to get consumer input into whatever development efforts you might be doing on your own or conjunction or in conjunction with brand partners or retailers or others who are bringing these to market online methods are tried and true as I said they're been around for a long time and they work so that's one reason why they can make sense they may not solve every part of the puzzle but they're an important piece of the puzzle and generally it's that contextual piece that Brian was talking about and I didn't have to go through all this but but I would insert the fourth point on this page I wouldn't underestimate the value of talking consumers right now I've heard some of our clients who have said T I don't know I don't want to talk to people or when they're not themselves when they're home and when they they may not be telling us things that will be reflected in what's happening in the real world and certainly there's a little bit of filtering out of what they say right now there's some things that are just about to hear now but in the in the sessions we go there are some clear things that are going to stick when I mentioned some of the safety and sanitary kinds of considerations wanting a lot of product assurance of quality and integrity that there may be we're going to stop the mind a few years ago or pre-COVID but also what we find in the COVID environment when people are home at home some things that were small kind of latent needs problems become really big when you're in a limited environment and I think it's really actually an excellent time to go out there and find out what some of those are and be on the leading edge of addressing them as we move out of this so I bottom line is stay connected to your your consumers and the users of some of your products and packaging I think that's really important and last thing I have just listed here maybe to go through others but there are some kind of best practices in terms of online research and approaches I've kind of covered this already but this just kind of talks about some of the differences and advantages and disadvantages and I think we've sort of covered there that insight focus groups or depth interviews that's really would be the ability to see people's expressions and the nice thing about doing this now is people have time on their hands I know people are beginning to return to work more so in some areas than others but a lot of people at home and they are ready to talk and so it's an opportunity it's actually a lot easier to execute a smaller larger scope than some of the research I've been now and before and then digital ethnographies and insight communities as I said that's really about getting to the contextual elements the real world of people's lives in their homes as they shop as they go about their day-to-day lives and there's some guidance in all of these we would do things a bit different than you would in a live setting for instance in a focus group we wouldn't do an eight-person focus group generally we'd do three or four people maybe five at the max just because of the complexities of dealing with the technology it's hard to have a free-for-all with lots of people talking at the same time if you can't get any of them so you can manage things like that a little bit better a smaller group so anyway some conclusions from this and I'll turn it back to Brian to wrap us up here don't be putting the innovate now I really feel and I'm hearing this from clients too that after a couple of months of some degree of lockdown or business not being as usual well there are companies and I would say competitors out there who are who have taken that time the last two or three months to figure out how's the world going to be different where are my consumers and how do I bring some stuff to market where the world make a difference and I think it's also an opportune time if you're a contract package or a contract manufacturer to begin bringing some of those ideas proactively if you're not always doing that to the brands that you're working with because they're looking for ideas right now and we're just getting to a point where people maybe have a little bit of budget to spend and there's this is a real opportunity and I think not losing touch with our consumers during that time like this is really the one thing to do there are also some pretty scrappy very cost effective ways to do some of the stuff I just over to you Brian with some closing thoughts that's great Phil thank you very very insightful and I know we've been asked by a number of companies big and small for what's what's happening with consumer insight now that people are quarantined and working remotely and so on and Bill's been great in bringing us some of those methodologies and taking them together to our clients for packaging design in particular and it's funny as you were talking I thought about our definition of design as we think about packaging it's it's the look and feel it's the form and function and sometimes most importantly is the emotional connection to the brand and a lot of people especially technical folks and men for the matter say that they don't shop emotionally they shop logically practically but the truth is the research shows most most purchases and decisions are at the 80 percent emotional and this brings us to that a little bit that you know we look at value and how do you communicate value through packaging and package design and the value is equal to benefits over cost versus a competition will cost is always easy to quantify and easy to focus on but the real and perceived benefits that packaging can communicate and deliver about the brand and about the product are really crucial um they tend to be emotional they tend to be about things like relevance and differentiation delivering portion control communicating the brand the brand message as a brand asset emotional fulfillment they're all all very difficult things to quantify and business decision makers love to quantify things but frankly the most important things that go through the consumer's mind when they purchase are emotional and not always quantifiable so it's an important thing to keep in mind when doing research so what's what's it mean for contract manufacturers contract packages and also everybody in the along the value chain we know that packaging influences consumer product perceptions including things like taste and flavor it's a critical asset and contract manufacturers contract packages can help deliver the brand promise brands want new solutions and value we hear it all the time um leading contract manufacturers contract packages packaging suppliers should monitor consumer trends if nothing else monitor consumer trends and what's happening with them there's plenty of journals there's plenty of sources webinars to understand what's happening with consumers and maybe how you might be able to differentiate brands in the marketplace and we've worked with some to even conduct their own research we've had some bring a major brand to the table with them we've done work with bills firm and again brought them together and then done work to identify new package opportunities new opening features formats ceiling technologies a number of different things and then the leaders are doing that but also uh we we believe suppliers and we we know some who ask to be involved in consumer research with the brand owners the answer is not always yes um but also to see research so when brands go to their contract manufacturers and they say you know we're really we'd love to put this whatever this thing is a new ingredient say in a small pouch or a small sachet and it should really be a unique and novel touch and feel and and look with a great convenient opening feature quite often and way too often what happens is the contract manufacturer the supplier says well we can't do any of that here's what we can do and to bring big brands settle for whatever that solution is that can be manufactured today we really see an opportunity to not just be an order taker but to push back on them a little bit take this insight and look for ways to modify your equipment and your materials to deliver what the insights really really pulled out so they you know probably the brand owner tested a concept that was a brand message it was a specific product it was in a package it really should stay in that package and not change to something else just because a contract manufacturer can make that something else and we see collaboration and everything we do is key if you want to get the market quicker don't try doing it yourself whether you're an OEM material supplier converters even universities associations like the contract packaging association CMCP's everybody solves problems in new ways everybody brings something unique and different to the table and the more you can collaborate the more you're going to be be successful and then finally products fail for many reasons that that 90 number I shared earlier it can be bad messaging it can be one word in an advertisement it can be a bad package that wasn't the package that was tested it can be a flavor wasn't quite what they what was tested in a in a in a blind sensory test and then all of a sudden you put it in a different package and it changes the perception of how that that performs it can be so many different things but our job is to help you and help companies to be successful and improve improve the success rate Procter and Gamble I think has been quoted as having a 55 success rate so 90 average doesn't apply to everybody there are some really positive exceptions out there and that gold standard that gets tested and consumer insights have saying should be a gold standard that goes into a design brief a product brief and a marketing brief and that's that's again is a look and feel form and function design emotional connection to the brand so with that Ron we'll wrap up and certainly Phil and I can take any questions hey great thank you Brian thank you Phil appreciate this and by the way they're just an observation there's a lot of agreement appears to be on the go to the consumer now and get the insight that then now is the time to do that so that's positive and Phil just to minimize the sound issues I'll mute and unmute you if you don't mind during the conversation here but we do have a good question what are some of the leaders with respect to the understanding and using packaging to create new experience in solutions with packaging who wants to take that one I'll go first since I'm unmuted okay that's okay we've actually done a fair amount of benchmarking and best practice work around this excuse me I mentioned Procter and Gamble they've been a leader for a long time they really see packaging as part of the integrated solution in every one of their products and they're whatever they have 20 or 22 billion dollar brands we hear uh Nestle's name come up Unilever's name come up quite often uh who am I messing with Pepsi Coke I mean there are a number of companies who do it really well very few do it consistently very well I think most of those I mentioned are great at understanding consumer insight early on and really really trying to understand unarticulated consumer needs and one of the best practices and again I think it's Procter and Gamble is that on every one of their leading brands we're at least told that every 18 months they go back to consumers and they test the relevance of of their design their package design and if for some reason the color needs to change a little bit or a wording or a structural change they make those changes very subtly though is not to disrupt what's in the consumer's mind. Bill any add-ons? Joe, did you just say in any way that was on my list but I might just talk about what is more than norm uh and I think that is uh packaging being tested what I'm saying is typically about packaging packaging being tested uh late in the process I mean even some really big new companies that you would recognize and think of as being a high end of professionalism unfortunately that is something that tends to happen and I think that's actually an opportunity for uh the membership of this association because there may not be a function that really allows packaging to get involved early and in all the work we do at least that's like part of the very first conversations even the insight conversation I think that's that's what's really needed and uh there may be an opportunity to fill some of that gap for even some of the larger brand partners. Great thank you have an interesting one here has the consumer become more complex to understand and you were talking about filtering earlier can you give some insights on that? Bill I'm going to give you that one has the consumer become more complex? Yes I understand. Um wow that's a tough one to answer I I think um I think at the core if you think the core motivators that drive consumer behavior I don't think those actually change but the ways in which you can get those motivations addressed have the the number of things people are exposed to and with that particularly the advent of technology and e-commerce the number of things that people see all the time I think there's a lot of shorthand decision making and reaction that is happening that needs to be decoded and can be difficult to decode but it's not when we had a much simpler way to run sold products and fewer choices maybe it was easier to decode and I think that's why and back to that use of contextual research I thought that's so important now because there are a lot of these things people cannot even articulate what the complexity of the decision making and the choices that are evaluated you have to sort of see it in action infer and then then pose a question what's going on there to really understand it. Yeah I would add on to that that the what we've seen you know in my 30 some years in the industry is when a new technology becomes available in a category consumer expectations rise so that adds to a level of complexity because technology is moving so quickly and if I can you know 20 years ago I couldn't I didn't have a smartphone I couldn't go on there and research a product I didn't I didn't have a you know a wine bottle I could scan with my art or a pack of Oreos I could scan with my phone and have characters jump off it you know 20 or maybe that's 30 years 20 years ago putting a zipper on a cheese pack all of a sudden the entire shredded cheese category had to put reseal features on so the complexity I think comes in in the level of technology that becomes accepted that that's going to continue to advance and try and anticipate that and get out ahead of it and make investments to deliver those things to the marketplace will will continue to be important. Okay we got some good good to hear about smart sensors how soon would you see smart sensors on package and what are the challenges of embedding smart sensors on packages? I'll jump on that one Phil I'll try so we know we know from a lot of our work that three key areas that are crucial in the packaging industry looking out 10 years one is the circular economy and trying to figure out how to design products and packaging for the circular economy not thinking about the disposal at end of life but in reuse another one is e-commerce and direct the consumer it's not going away it's creating another level of complexity and then the third one is the internet of things or the internet of packaging which has a lot to do with building sensors and it's already being done quite often it's it's being done for those novel reasons like you know I can look at a wine bottle and and see the criminals jump jump into my phone or a character jump off the Oreo pack however we're seeing at least in different categories different apart parts of the world so so one of them would be powdered infant formula the major brands who are shipping globally it's a level of safety security authenticity that's required by mothers of babies when they buy that is enormous and there's a tremendous amount of work being done to put it's a leverage technology to make sure that there's no tampering there's no copy catting making sure that it's truly the brand that they they feel confident about so the technology is there we've got a number of other examples of technologies that are being applied in in in Europe and Asia less so in the United States and I'm not quite sure why but they're widely available again companies like Unilever like Nestle like Avid nutrition they've been employing some of them and what's cool is that they provide a total supply chain benefit not just safety security authenticity but once the codes exist the opportunity to leverage that that technology to carry supply chain data and help your your manufacturing and your company from a data and analysis perspective is also an important part that that can be integrated in we we've done some work recently with a company called DigiMark and it basically an invisible code that carries so much information invisibly and Proctor and Gamble and Walmart are doing work with it and we see tremendous opportunity for that to provide new value as well thanks let's jump into one it's a more really packaging fundamental what packaging format do you see as being the most popular today and will it be the same in the future so not only today but you know going forward still I'll give you a shot and then I'll jump in you know for the last several years we've watched the growth of flexibles and flexibles taking share from rigid packaging and then the number of different categories being perceived as more convenient in a lot of ways overall using less weight of packaging sustainability in the circular economy thing and maybe even security now in the drive towards I mean like from what I've seen center of store sales have gone up and e-commerce has grown like crazy through this quarantine as Phil said we don't know how much of that's going to stick and stay but you know we've seen prior to COVID a an anti-plastics movement and by the way we consider ourselves material agnostic package form agnostic we think they're all good for the right reasons but there's been this anti-plastic move and anything that's even perceived by consumers to be made from trees in some way tends to be perceived to be better for the environment whether it is or not doesn't matter and then we've done some some work around perceptions of products and brands that are most sustainable and this was a few years ago but drink boxes were seen as were is some of the best most sustainable packages there are and when we dug into it we found out even though there may be seven layers of material it's the paper on the outside that made the consumer believe that they were better for the environment so that's a tough one Ron I guess I'm not sure where the growth is going to be but I I think with the push on circular economy and the fact that we're going to have you know the world's going to be a billion people bigger before too long and resources are limited we're going to continue to have to make really smart choices and just do what's right whatever that package format is well that brings up a good lead into the next question which has to do with sustainability do you believe the consumer is ready to pay for sustainability initiatives and you just kind of touched on that in a bit I'll say something at the beginning here I was going to comment on sustainability and saying that I just what you said about circular economy I think if you take the one view on this we have a choice but to have a pretty significant conversion of natural materials and things that fit into a circular economy where people pay for it not so often I think that some of us today need to be it may be mandated it may be through pressure brought on corporations and brands to move in that direction that may be what drives it you'll have some folks who pay a little extra but I think we've all seen that the people's interest in that kind of thing compared to what they're really willing to pay for it there are two different things my sense of it right yeah all right the Phil's got a great handle on the marketplace and what people will and won't pay for us a few years ago again we did work for a major company that was essentially looking at a big investment in a bio polymer and it was a supplier company and we talked to I think it was 40 some experts at major brands 40 some who worked in the technical side of the business a research and development procurement operations and another 40 some who worked in marketing and they were on the brand side of the business and we had to go to them and say okay so this would be the concept you could put x amount of this bio polymer into your new package and they would ask you know what would it cost extra and we'd say well there would be an increase in in the cost 100 of the people we spoke with on the technical side of the big brand companies said our company will never marketing will never pay for it all they ever tell us is they want us to take costs out over 50% of the of the experts we spoke with who work in the brand side of the business said we would definitely pay more it would allow us to make a relevant claim in the marketplace we would either increase the cost of our product or we would we would take the risk on reducing our margin because we're looking to differentiate our our brand and that would be something if we could make a reputable claim that we would consider switching to right i think we're going to close out with this one because i think this is going to give you the uh the big bell here so what are your thoughts on the consumer in a post-covid world the changes the direction of the future you know it's a we do a lot of work because you know ron and some some of the listeners do on the future packaging we work with futurists we leverage foresight we've been we are making changes we know that consumers are experimenting more than they have in ages um brands that you know you know with because they were at the center of the store and they were long shelf life dry items canned items they're eating them now and they're trying them and they may stay with those and they may become more familiar with those package formats so safety security is becoming more of an issue um and i think packaging features that whether it's tamper evidence or just making sure that they're clean in some way you know we see beer cans that have plastic covers on them maybe that'll be more normal we we can't really predict the future but there's a lot of things pointing to new opportunities we we think um you know plastic bag bands and in the various states uh the bands went away we think the bands will come back we as phil said we've got to we've got to think take the long-term view and really look at uh what kind of things need to stick and what kind of things we'll we'll go back to and any commerce will not go back uh to the numbers that was that they've accelerated and and we're getting more accustomed to um home delivery of groceries food and we need innovation i think innovation will be necessary and will drive new solutions in all of those areas i talked about whether it's e-commerce or circular economy or the internet of things and and i just add uh to brian's very good list one of the things i think is going to be mostly mental changes and i think it's going to be important and it's thinking of brands and companies in a humanized way and having an expectation that they for me to buy a product or service it has to reflect my values in some way i think we're seeing that the role of brand as an advocate is as much bigger than ever was um and and as i said earlier i think that really puts a lot of uh responsibility on packaging to help reinforce that and help convey it and i think uh you know demands for the transparency and understanding um materials and nothing else that goes in the product or service but also um just the consult of what is this the total of this brand that is in our business that we can rely on as a person we have a more transactional feel i think that's a big deal to look on for every gentleman they've gone to our time we want to thank you you guys never disappoint again reminding everyone who's on the call the webinar will be up in a day or two on the contract packaging website we'll issue a quick survey after this is over please answer it and thank you all for attending thank you brian thank you phil and everybody have a great day