JimCarroll

Nestlé engaged me to provide a concise, detailed overview of the key retail and packaging trends affecting the consumer-products industry.

The strategic issue was larger than packaging itself.

Retail was changing.

Consumer expectations were changing.

The way products competed for attention was changing.

And the organization needed to think about those trends through the lens of innovation.

The keynote focused not simply on what was changing, but on what Nestlé needed to do to build a more forward-oriented culture capable of responding to that change.

That distinction matters.

Trend awareness by itself is not enough.

An organization can understand exactly what is happening in the market and still fail to respond if its culture, decision-making and innovation processes are too slow.

Six themes frame the engagement:

1. Retail Change. Consumer-products organizations needed to track how retail environments were evolving.
2. Packaging Innovation. Packaging was becoming an increasingly important source of differentiation and consumer interaction.
3. Consumer Expectations. Customer behavior was changing the way products needed to be positioned and presented.
4. Innovation Culture. Trend awareness had to translate into a more forward-oriented operating mindset.
5. Speed of Response. Organizations needed the ability to respond faster as retail and consumer trends accelerated.
6. Continuous Reinvention. Established brands needed to keep challenging assumptions around product, packaging and channel.

The broader lesson was that innovation does not always mean inventing an entirely new product.

Sometimes it is the package.

The channel.

The experience.

The process.

Or the way the organization responds to a new consumer behavior.

That is why consumer-products organizations must continually look beyond the product itself.

The future of consumer products would belong to organizations that treated retail, packaging and culture as parts of the same innovation system.