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It’s an exciting day here at the drupa cube.
There’s a room full of people that are interested in developing packaging to the next level.
The most important of the trends is really the existence and emergence of the virtual world and social media.
That is influencing shopper behavior.
It is connecting, through packaging, people to get back to the Internet,
and, from the Internet, back to packaging.
This can only be done in a relationship of products of one
or products for communities of customization through the power of digital print.
I often get the question, with the emergence of e-commerce, how important packaging will be.
Will the importance of packaging play a lesser role in the future?
Packaging will always play an important role because it has multiple functions.
It has the purpose of communicating to consumers not only on shelf
but also at the second moment of truth, when it is used by the consumer.
It has to deliver a good consumer experience.
There can be a lot of creative possibilities to communicate on a package how a user can start an interaction.
How mobile phone users who for example they have a package in front of them, they can start any kind of interaction.
This includes SMS, QR codes, interactive communication and last, but not least, augmented reality.
One big thing that you can do is at the end of the day, you can generate statistics and you can generate data.
You know what users scan and what users don’t scan.
You’ll know where to click and this profiling and data mining can be a big topic at the end of the day.
HP Indigo’s digital printing has fascinated me for several years on three levels that are important to packaging.
First, it is the print quality.
Secondly, it is the simplification of the supply chain that is possible.
Third, it is the reduction of the waste stream that occurs during printing and during the inventory of package materials.
Digital printing could have a significant impact, in particular, as the consumers want to have more personalized packaging.
That means if I have today to order tons of material and putting in inventory,
only in the hope we sell that later, we take away all our reaction time.
That means in terms of sustainability, I see digital printing could be a very positive aspect,
to have shorter reaction and in particular to react better to the needs of the consumer.
With the new announcements that I’m hearing from HP Indigo
on wide format presses for both folding carton and for webs,
that is going to be very exciting because here I see the ability now to do many more brands
that were never possible before with just a 12.5 inch wide web.
We introduce now two new machines, the 20000 and the 30000
which are clearly in line with what the needs are.
Technically these two new machines are addressing new markets that we barely enter until now
and what I see is that there will be a massive implementation.
The ramp up that we went through in the label industry, we learned a lot.
So it helped us a lot and the ramp up will be much faster now with flexible packaging and folding carton.
We have a great platform. The adoption of digital in general is there.
Everybody’s using a computer. Everybody’s using a smartphone.
We have all of these connections.
I see that the supply chain, from suppliers to brand owners, will integrate sooner or later in a certain way; digital, of course.
So, all this will facilitate penetration and growth; a faster ramp up and the growth clearly.