Mintel announces five global packaging trends for 2018
According to Mintel, packaging will play a pivotal role in reducing global food and product waste in 2018.
Benjamin Punchard, global packaging insights director at Mintel, discusses the major trends set to influence the packaging sector worldwide in 2018, including implications for consumers, brands, and manufacturers.
As more and more consumers embrace online shopping, the study also predicts packaging to play a pivotal role in brands' and consumers' e-commerce experiences. Online brands will reinvigorate their packaging in order to enhance the e-commerce experience.
Aiming for packaging designs that enlighten consumers’ purchase decisions, brands will reject approaches that offer too much or too little as they can leave shoppers more confused than informed. Plastic packaging adrift in the world's oceans will become the catalyst driving brands to rethink packaging in a context consumers can understand and act upon.
Brands will look to contemporary packaging formats to help reinvigorate the centre-of-store aisles less visited by younger consumers.
Young shoppers are increasingly ‘shopping the periphery’, visiting the fresh and chilled aisles around the store perimeter and turning their backs on processed, ambient, and frozen offerings in the centre of the store. The use of transparent materials, contemporary design, recyclability, or unique shapes can help draw in younger consumers to the store centre, making it as appealing as the burgeoning perimeter to younger consumers.
Punchard said, “Our packaging trends for 2018 reflect the most current and forward-looking consumer attitudes, actions, and purchasing behaviours in both global and local markets. Such trends as those we see emerging in e-commerce packaging have stories that are just now being written. Others, such as the attack on plastics, are well into their third or even fourth chapters, but with no clear ending in sight. It is those backstories and future-forward implications that position Mintel’s 2018 Packaging Trends as essential to retailer, brand, and package converter strategies during the coming year and beyond.”
