‘Hi, this is your shelf. Would you like more Marmite?’
Me: “Hmm, thanks Mr Shelf. Order me some, and dig out some recipes that use Marmite too.”
As things stand, the contents of the Mills family larder are analogue. There’s not a single product that connects to any device, tells me it’s about to run out, allows me to access any content about it, or is in any way helpful other than doing what it’s supposed to do.
Even if I was so inclined to listen, I couldn’t receive an alert from some tub of metrosexual gunk on the bathroom shelf telling me it was cold this morning, and it might be a good idea if I moisturised myself up; or a tin of tuna which told me where to access tuna recipes.
But it might not be that way in the future. This week Mindshare released the results of a study developed together with The Sharp End, an Internet of Things agency. They put a variety of connected household products – including personal care products like a moisturiser (which could indeed ‘read’ a weather forecast and advise me accordingly about my personal toiletry) and shampoo, Absolut, and Old El Paso wraps – into five households to see how they interacted with them, and how they felt about it.
You can read the official version here.
You might wonder: why is Mindshare playing around in this area? Well, first, it’s the kind of thing any modern, forward-looking media agency should be doing; two, there are media implications too – certainly in the programmatic and cross-device spheres; three, there’s the potential to generate relevant and useful consumer data; four, different user groups can be segmented by experiences; and five, connected packaging has serious implications for clients, whether service providers, packaged goods manufacturers, or retailers. Where they go, media agencies need to be.
There’s growing interest in this area. Last month I sat in an auditorium and watched five new-tech packaging companies pitch their wares to over 100 brand managers and marketers.
Some people take the Bob Hoffman Ad Contrarian view about the possibility of interacting with household products, which essentially posits that just because you can, doesn’t mean anyone wants to.
He wrote: “We will have the internet of things that all do the same thing. We will have espresso machines that can iron our underwear and blenders that can barbecue a chicken. We will be talking into our toilets and shitting in our toasters.”
But not the Mindshare households, or indeed a parallel survey of 1,000 consumers:
– 62% found the idea of re-ordering appealing
– 58% liked the idea of a reminder close to expiry date
– More than 50% are interested in scanning packaging to find out more about provenance
– 62% would trade their data for something of value.
But what constitutes value? A few months ago, I was with Bob Hoffman. Now I’m not so sure. Usefulness and convenience might convince me.
The Mindshare study focused on four possible areas: product re-ordering or replenishment; usage guidance (i.e. recipes, inspiration); conditional notifications (such as expiry dates, location-based prompts (i.e. ‘you’re running low on shampoo and this store round the corner has our stuff’) or weather-related usage; and brand stories (i.e. provenance) – such as those available from Absolut.
What with bluetooth-enabled wireless buttons like Amazon’s Dash, the Flic, Shazam or new inks, all these things are possible.
This is where it gets interesting for packaged goods products, and their owners. One outcome is that they may be able to re-invent themselves as ‘service’ companies with whom consumers have a subscription-based relationship.
So your typical global manufacturer of detergents, kitchen wipes and toilet bleach could become a provider of household cleaning services – automatically supplying you with detergent as and when the packaging tells them they are running out, for which privilege you pay, say, £10 a month.
And if not cleaning products, then personal care, or hair care and so on.
Absolut owner Pernod Ricard might become your online off-licence, replenishing gin, scotch, vodka and fizzy stuff like Perrier-Jouet.
On the morning of a cold day during the Mindshare trial, participants received a notification via their mobile to remind them to use a moisturiser or hand cream.
According to Mindshare, 39% of households might consider such a relationship – providing, says Mindshare client director Jeremy Pounder, they can see where the brands add value to their lives.
From the point of view of the packaged goods giants of this world, this would be highly desirable, allowing as it would the chance to disintermediate retailers. But as of now it is somewhat fanciful: to get the goods from warehouse to home – via Amazon perhaps – they would seriously have to re-engineer themselves.
And the defining quality of a service brand is trust. Do the likes of Reckitts, P&G, Unilever or Pernod Ricard have that level of trust?
Possibly, but perhaps not yet in two key areas: one, capability – in other words, can it actually handle the necessary logistics?; and two, can consumers trust them with their data? Only then can it they begin to persuade consumers that they genuinely add value.
There’s no doubt though that data will be the key. For the most part, packaged goods brands have limited access to consumer data – unless they buy it from the retailers.
But if they can start to access more consumer data, particularly at the consumption and usage level – as opposed to cookie-dependent data – they can start to wrest control of the consumer relationship back from the retailers.
And that would be a battle worth winning.
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Lead illustration by Natasha Searston.