Work with the consumer to make sense of the chaos of shopping

Every time you ran the model it would give you a different answer. What’s more, everyone would be right.

In other words, he explained, consumers are individually very random beings, and operate in a very random system so that overall there is so much randomness that every time you do something you will get a different answer. In fact, he argued, it’s impossible to predictively model consumer behaviour.

The solution, at least to his mind, was this: start to go down the track of putting as many developments to market testing as possible. Only when you see interest should you then take something further and build on that little lead you have created. That lead will have tilted the system in which you are working in your favour. It all makes a lot of sense.

So why don’t we practise this? I see a lot of companies standing back and expecting turgid market research to tell them what to do. New methods are evolving which enable us to follow much more dynamic and iterative product development processes.

My colleagues at Design Perspectives reported on work in this vein over the summer. But responses in the marketing press were pretty negative. The attitude seemed to be that if it wasn’t invented by the agencies, then it couldn’t work.

Yet isn’t there a real opportunity here for packaging innovation to lead the way? The consumer is the ultimate head of our supply chain. We have a wonderful opportunity to take up some of this new science, if only we are brave enough. Work directly with the consumer and we could cut through some of that chaos.

Walter Lewis is managing director of packaging thinktank Faraday Packaging Partnership

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