INTERVIEW: CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF CONSUMER PACKAGED GOODS As Covid-19 is changing the way all of us live our lives, Elisabeth Skoda talks to James Harmer, planning & innovation strategy leader at Cambridge Design Partnership about changing perceptions of consumer packaged goods, and the effects of the virus on consumer behaviour and packaging innovation. ES: Clearly, Covid-19 means that 2020 has not played out the way we thought it would. Before this, what were the main trends in CPG you anticipated for 2020?
about lightweighting, material reduction and that kind of thing. But with a global recession looming, this compression is likely to be even more of a challenge.
JH: Like anybody that’s involved in this industry, we weren’t resting on
ES: The virus has changed how we all live our lives. How has it changed
our laurels before the crisis hit. Everyone was uniting around the sustainability challenges we face so that was the overarching trend you were seeing at conferences etc. There had been a lot of interest in returnable packaging and some interesting developments in smart packaging. Alongside this, FMCG companies had been seeing a lot of margin compression so they were having to innovative in different ways, thinking
consumer behaviour or shifted priorities?
JH: One thing that’s come to the fore is that the pandemic has created lots of tension points in terms of what the right information is, what consumers should be doing and how they should be handling things. There has been consumer concern about the packaging materials themselves and what kinds of materials Packaging Europe | 59 |
