Archives for April 2014

Tracking Consumer Attitudes Towards Packaging

By Jim Johnson,

Steve Kazanjian says, is not surprising: packaging helps determine what consumers purchase.

But the vice president of global creative for MeadWestvaco Corp., also has this to add: packaging, now more than ever, helps determine a consumer’s relationship with a product far beyond that decision to make an initial purchase.

“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that the role that packaging has played in that brand/consumer relationship has changed irrevocably over the last 20 years, 10 years and even 5 years,” he said during a recent presentation at the Packaging Conference in Orlando.

“At one point, when we thought about packaging, we really just thought about the various functional aspects of the package. So storage and convenience, breakage, temperature, loss, security, things like that. Getting it from the manufacturer through the supply chain and into the retail chain,” Kazanjian said.

While those considerations are just as important as ever, modern consumers view packaging through a larger prism.

“There’s also this new role in packaging. And this new role in packaging that we’ve seen over last five or 10 years has been the emotional role of packaging, the consumer side. The role that packaging plays past retail through use and into the end-of-life,” he said.

MeadWestvaco is out with its second annual Packaging Matters study of consumer attitudes toward packaging.

It’s an important topic for the Richmond, Va.-based company, which gets 83 percent of its $5.3 billion of annual sales from packaging, including those made from plastics.

“Packaging influences purchasing behavior. This really isn’t any new spoiler alert for any of us. We know this. However, there’s some other interesting things that are going on with this as well. Packaging during use also influences repurchase behavior in ways that we couldn’t even dream of,” Kazanjian said in Orlando.

Packaging satisfaction, he said, helps drive product satisfaction that helps drive brand preference that helps drive repeat purchasing behavior.

To see the full article from PlasticsNews, click here.

Plastics are a Sustainable Packaging Choice

Sustainable Packaging – By Gayle S. Putrich,

Six major categories of plastic packaging significantly reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions compared to packaging made with alternative materials, according to a new study.

Compiled by Franklin Associates for the American Chemistry Council and the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, and using 2010 as a baseline year, the data shows replacing plastic packaging with alternative materials would result in a 4.5 times more packaging weight, an 80 percent increase in energy use and 130 percent more global warming potential.

“The benefits hold up across a range of different kinds of applications and materials,” said Keith Christman, managing director of plastics markets for ACC. “Because plastics use so much less material in the first place it results in dramatic greenhouse gas reduction, and that’s just the start. It really adds up across the different types of packaging, to the equivalent of taking more than 15 million cars off the road.”

The study pits the six major packaging resins — low density polyethylene, high density PE, polypropylene, PVC, polystyrene, expanded PS, PET — against paper, glass, steel, aluminum, textiles, rubber, and cork. It considers the implications of the materials used in caps and closures, beverage containers, other rigid containers, shopping bags, shrink wrap, and other flexible packaging in a detailed life cycle assessment. Individual studies on particular products have been done before, Christman said, on products ranging from plastic pouches vs. cans for tuna and EPS vs. paper cups. But the new study, titled Impact of Plastics Packaging on Life Cycle Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the United States and Canada, is comparatively sweeping. It contains more than 50 tables and 16 charts and illustrations and examines each of the major life cycle stages for packaging: raw material production, packaging fabrication, distribution transport, post-consumer disposal and recycling.

To see the full article from PlasticsNews, click here.