Trend: The Future of Packaging & Retail: I’m Featured in Frame, the Leading Global Design Magazine!

My insight on the future of packaging is featured in the May/June issue of Frame magazine, ostensibly the the leading global publications focused on all things ‘design.’

The article offers up all the thoughts I have on the future of packaging in the world of retail – hyperconnected, aware, interactive, and a world in which the package is the brand. I’ve been speaking and writing about the future of packaging for almost 20 years — take a look at some of the posts in this link here.

I’m working on getting the text and will link to it, but for now, here’s the article in image form. Click to make it bigger!

Here’s the text:

Shopping is becoming a matter of seconds
Frame Magazine, May/June 2017

‘I did all of my Christmas shopping on Amazon this year and didn’t visit a single store,’ says American futurist Jim Carroll, an expert in spotting trends and innovative advances. ‘It’s hard to discount the speed of change occurring in the world of retail and consumer products. It is in a state of upheaval.’

Some of the trends? He mentions ‘shopper or proximity marketing’, which combines location intelligence, constant mobile connection and in-store display to create a new form of instantaneously personalized in-store promotion. Mobile payment involving Apple Pay is ticking upwards, and – also pioneered by the likes of Apple – the cash register is disappearing, replaced by portable wireless credit-card devices.

>Big brands like Google, Amazon and the John Lewis department stores continue their move to same-day shipping. Even the automobile is being turned into an online shopping and credit-card platform. Tech like Amazon Alexa, AI and shopping bots require no more than a spoken word to add a product to our shopping cart for delivery within an hour, while a ‘click and collect’ infrastructure allows for same-day pick-up, at a bricks-and-mortar location, of an online purchase.

It’s clear that active intelligent packaging and Internet of Things products, which have been disrupting product life cycles, are accelerating product obsolescence and affecting both inventory and supply chain. ‘This means,’ says Carroll, ‘that faster “store fashion” with rapid evolution of in-store promotion, layout and interaction will become critically important.’

Although the average consumer can scan 3.6 m of shelf space per second, consumers wander around stores today glued to the screens of mobile devices, paying only incidental attention to merchandise, store layout, branding or promotional messages. No wonder TV screens and video projections are filling stores. ‘Mobile interactions in the retail space are the new normal for purchasing influence,’ Carroll says. ‘Retailers have got only micro-seconds to grab the attention of the low-attention-span shopper, which means that we will have to constantly innovate and adapt our retail space. The very nature of in-store interaction, flow and layout is changing very fast.’

How designers will respond to these rapid changes imaginatively is still a blank page for designers to fill. ‘We are going to see more change in the world of retail in the next five years than we have seen in the last 100. That doesn’t mean traditional design parameters and methodologies will disappear. It’s just that we now have opportunities to integrate unique technology interaction into retail design in a wide variety of ways,’ Carroll says. ‘I think there’sopportunity coming for innovation in the design of retail space, not less.’