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Be Ready for Gen Z

Brands and CPGs reinventing themselves and their packaging isn't just window dressing. It's essential to stay relevant to Gen Z, with it's unique set of behaviors and wants.

Matt Reynolds1

I’ve frequently opined on what I think is an admirable brand owner and CPG trend toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. As such things relate to packaging, they’re realized either via a physical change in packaging structure that makes the product more accessible to some group, or by a change in graphics and text on the packages themselves that promote a brand’s internal diversity and inclusion policies.

While I consider this trend a good thing overall, we should probably remind ourselves that it isn’t driven by altruism alone. If these changes weren’t profitable, they likely would not get done at all. Consider cases of structural changes to packaging, like P&G’s etched Herbal Essences bottles for people with vision impairment (pwgo.to/7310) or Unilever and Degree’s accessible deodorant for people with limb disabilities (pwgo.to/7239). Those projects get the greenlight, at least partially, thanks to an underlying brand owner realization and financial calculation that significant portions of the global market are underserved, and their dollars are being left on the table.

But what about when it’s just new graphics and not a functionally new package structure that attempts to achieve diversity goals? (Think Land o’ Lakes eliminating the Native American woman or Mrs. Butterworth’s sidelining the matronly Black grandmother figure.) These adjustments in graphics don’t directly open a new and unserved market the way the above-mentioned structural changes do, which is why they often made me think they were more window dressing than anything else.

That way of thinking underwent a big change at the Craft Brew Conference in Denver, Sept. 9-12. There it became clear to me that brands are championing inclusiveness and celebrating diversity as a matter of future survival, and the financial underpinnings of this trend are in society’s changing demographics.

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