Steve Kelsey: Packaging’s performance must be paid for

This may come as a shock but some people believe that packaging is not rocket science. It may seem incredible, but there are people who don’t think about what it takes to design, engineer, manufacture and distribute packaging at all.

I know; it threw me into a tizzy when I found out.

Now you might imagine that these people have been significantly disadvantaged in life. They may have suffered from an Oxbridge education or may have been paid extraordinarily large salaries for achieving little of merit. In short, they may have an entirely warped sense of reality. You would be entirely correct in this assessment.

Unfortunately we are stuck with them for the time being. So to see if there was a way of explaining to one of them how vital the packaging industry is, I tried an analogy. I mean if they are able to cope with the spring term being called ‘Hillary’ and the river Thames being called ‘Isis’ you would think they could cope with a well-thought-through analogy, wouldn’t you?

Imagine, I asked, that you applied the same standards to the car industry. What sort of car would you get if your only criteria were cost and functionality? How well would it be developed if there was no margin for a decent profit that would allow serious R&D; if consumer benefit was only deliverable where it could be fitted into the lowest possible sales price, which is expected to reduce over time irrespective of the economic conditions? How effective, easy to use and rewarding a vehicle would be delivered if the car business had to adopt the same R&D and engineering budget as the packaging business? A cost-engineered Trabant, anyone?

In reality the packaging industry does an outstanding job delivering functionality and user satisfaction and in terms of delivery for cost far outstrips the automotive business.

“Aha”, the cultured one might proclaim (they proclaim and enunciate, they never just speak). “This is evidence that the market works.”

Only up until the point it stops, and we may have reached that limit this decade. Never have there been more demands put on packaging than today and this at a time when there have rarely been fewer resources and investment to deliver. It is time to state the obvious. When everything really has been cut to the bone, and even further in some cases, all you are going to get from that point on is bone soup.

If we need even higher levels of performance from packaging the industry needs two things: an understanding that further improvements will incur costs, which must be passed on; and recognition that if the car business was as undervalued and under-invested as packaging is, we would all prefer to walk to work. Eventually, diminishing returns stop altogether. It’s time to start paying for performance again.

Steve Kelsey is strategic innovations director at PI Global. Send comments for Steve to packagingnews.editorial@haymarket.com

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