How should your packaging look and feel like to win with the shopper at the First Moment of Truth (FMOT), and what are features that delight the consumers at the Second Moment of Truth (SMOT) at home when they use your products? What are the right levers you should use to make a lasting impression with consumers at the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) when they have the first contact with your product online?
Unleashing the power of packaging
We help you with our 20+ years of packaging development experience in multinational FMCG companies to unleash the full potential of packaging for your brands and products.
Packaging today is one of the most important and yet still most neglected marketing tools for your brands. Of course most packages fulfill the basic technical requirements such as product protection and efficient distribution along the entire supply chain, but do they really let your brand shine and stand out at the different moments of truth when consumers decide about buying your product or your competitor's?
Is your packaging too complex and too expensive without the appropriate return on investment? Is your packaging recyclable and designed to use recycled plastics? And is your organization agile and innovative to fuel the upcoming initiatives with consumer meaningful packaging innovations? We don’t know all the answers to these questions, but we are there to find them together with you and our widespread network of packaging experts and suppliers.
As every challenge is different, every project is different. But our approach to successful solutions and implementations always has three main pillars. And of course, we never forget to always think outside the box.
After the clear definition of your project, we assess the landscape by collecting input from all stakeholders both within your company and from all suppliers and customers involved. If necessary, we also involve non adjacent partners in the value creation chain or initiate customer and consumer research to ensure we have the most complete picture of the challenge.
In the ideation phase we think outside of the box and work with you to come up with a broad range of potential solutions, independent of current boundaries, internal barriers or financial implications. Here we also involve our widespread packaging industry network to get views from different angles. Together with all of your key stakeholders we then identify the best solutions and tailor them to the specific through a rigorous innovation funnel. Finally, the implementation and rollout is planned and executed.
In the last years the importance of packaging for successful product launches in the FMCG industry has fundamentally changed, from being the necessary evil to an important marketing tool and a delighter for customers and consumers that drives trial and brand loyalty.
This role will keep evolving and getting even more important with the steep rise of e-commerce, the "Internet of Things" and upcoming disruptive innovations such as e.g. active and smart packages and devices. Today these new technologies are mostly too expensive for consumer packaged goods, but this will change in the near future. What is missing, however, are applications that are truly meaningful to consumers and customers delivering unique benefits to both. And different to product benefits, the packaging perception is rather subconscious, which makes it so difficult to just ask stakeholders what they want and implement it. Our long experience in the industry with so many solved challenges over the past decades puts us in a unique position to help you with whatever your specific challenge might be in these exciting times in the FMCG packaging world.
e x p e r t i s e
Moments of Truth
Intelligent Cost Reduction
How can you reduce the cost of packaging in a smart way and how much money should you spend on the packaging to ensure consumers are curious to try your product and like it that much that they keep repurchasing it over and over again? What is the right sweet spot between too much and not enough packaging?
Truly Sustainable Packaging
How can you make your products and packages ready for the circular economy? And how can you really make a positive impact on the environmental footprint of your products and packages without greenwashing and irritating consumers? How can you be in the driver seat making your packages truly recyclable in the regions where you have your businesses and what is the best way to use as much recycled materials as possible?
Supply Chain Efficiency
How to make your packages compatible and cost efficient with the entire supply chain, starting with the production and assembly at suppliers, then your production lines and delivery to customers, and ending with the consumers at home? What does it take to make your products ready for e-commerce? How can you use digitalization and late stage differentiation to deliver customized products with less complexity in your production lines?
Innovation Organization
How should you build your organization, communication and collaboration structure to ensures a never ending stream of meaningful packaging and device innovations, that truly help to drive your business results? How can you keep or make your teams agile and dynamic, always looking out of the box with a drive and passion for innovation? Which technical expertise do you need in-house, and what can be outsourced to suppliers as developing partners?
People
What are the right skills and experiences your people should have and where can you find them and keep them motivated to stay? What is the right balance between technical experts and allrounders? Which skills and capabilities fit to your specific challenges, and how can you develop and grow your people together with you?
s e r v i c e s
Project Consultancy and Supplier Management
We consult and support you on specific packaging and innovation projects and give a different view on solutions to your challenges. We can review and manage your supplier portfolio and bring in new partners if we believe this could be beneficial for your project. If you are a supplier we help you to provide the best possible service to your customers on the respective projects.
Organisation and Communication Restructuring
We help and consult you to make your packaging organization more agile and innovative. We review your organization structure, collaboration and communication channels and work together with you to find the optimum set-up. We also help you how you communicate and collaborate with your external packaging development partners across the different functions in your organization and look for new ways how to increase efficiency and results that sustainably grow both of your businesses.
Coachings, Education and Ideation
We coach and educate people and teams in your organization to become more innovative and agile, to foster out-of-box thinking and develop a passion for truly meaningful packaging innovations that delight consumers. We help you to create and execute ideation sessions, that give a different view on possibilities how to sustainably grow your business. And we are there to share the perspective of potential customers and their internal decision structures to enable your teams to focus on the right topics.
Interim Management and Investor Consulting
We consult and advise the potential of mergers and acquisitions in the packaging industry, and work together with investors to find the right opportunities for win-win situations. The ownership structure of the packaging industry worldwide has fundamentally changed over the past years with many mergers and acquisitions especially of smaller family owned companies, some successful some not. This trend will continue, and we help you with our profound experience in the packaging supplier landscape to make the right decisions and avoid costly mistakes.
Portfolio Analysis and Smart Cost Chase
We help you to take a look at your portfolio of products and services with a fresh pair of eyes to find what is really important to grow your business and what are products and services, that consume resources and increase your complexity but are not really necessary for your business success. We also look at the cost structure of the packages and packaging technologies that you are offering to your consumers and customers to evaluate whether the total cost of the packages and products can be reduced without affecting the performance and value perception.
Customer and Consumer Understanding
We help you to find the really important unmet needs of your consumers and customers to make sure you can make the right decisions how to set priorities in your business areas and you can utilize the full business potential. This can be consumers who buy, use and hopefully repurchase your products because they truly like them, or it can be customers of you, who are looking for technical innovations in a specific packaging field, that they do not have internally. Especially when it comes to packaging innovation, consumers and customers cannot easily express what they are looking for, therefore we help you together with our partners to dig deep and get to the root of the consumer and customer wishes, so that you can focus on the right innovations.
a b o u t
Dr. Martin Zethoff
Creator of Packaging Innovation that drives sustainable Brand and Business Success
Dr. Martin Zethoff has worked for more than 20 years in leading positions in R&D Packaging Development Organizations for various multinational FMCG companies. His main focus and passion has always been to overcome the challenges in finding smart and consumer meaningful packaging innovation ideas that have a lasting positive impact on the business results.
He has demonstrated his drive for packaging innovation through numerous successful launches in various FMCG categories around the world over the past two decades. He has been a champion and key driver of the concept of the First and Second Moment of Truth (FMOT and SMOT), where packaging plays a key role to create a sustainable business through trial and repurchase. This enabled him to fundamentally change the focus on packaging and the role that the packaging development departments had in the companies he has worked for.
Packaging innovation does not happen in isolation, therefore Dr. Martin Zethoff has established a large global network with key players in the FMCG packaging industry such as packaging material suppliers, packaging machinery vendors, design agencies, resin suppliers, mold builders, label suppliers and so on. Similar to other industries, innovation capabilities have become an important point of differentiation for suppliers and vendors, and his focus has always been to find new ways of collaboration between brand owners and vendors.
He has a master degree in experimental physics and a PhD from the Ruhr University Bochum in Experimental Plasmaphysics. Later he attended the Harvard Business school to learn about the importance of business strategies.
Highlights Work Experience
Supply Chain Director International Production Steering at Henkel Global Supply Chain B.V. in Amsterdam
R&D Director International Packaging Technology Laundry & Home Care at Henkel AG & KGaA in Düsseldorf
R&D Section Head Hair Color Packaging & Device Development at Wella AG in Darmstadt
R&D Group Leader Baby & Personal Care Packaging Development at Procter & Gamble GmbH in Schwalbach and Dover
R&D Group Leader Diapers Packaging & Device Development at Procter & Gamble GmbH in Schwalbach
c o n t a c t
Curious what we can do for you? Then contact us
Dr. Martin Zethoff
Kellermannsweg
44795 Bochum
Germany
+49 172 232 3838
mail@innopaqq.com
Gustav Mahlerlaan
Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31 6 3815 4436
mail@innopaqq.com
