Отвергая «инволюцию»: где находится путь прорыва для предприятий полиграфической и упаковочной отрасли?

Everything is about "involution". The term "involution" has appeared especially frequently this year. Economic involution, educational involution, fandom involution, workplace involution, property market involution, and more recently the involution of the internet and entertainment industries...

In the packaging industry, this is reflected not only in upstream inflation and downstream contraction, but also in competition among enterprises that has reached a white-hot level. Yet this vicious competition seems to have no end in sight.

Facing this zero-sum game over existing stock and cutthroat price wars, the packaging industry can only break out of the encirclement and regain vitality by opening up new growth points. So what new opportunities will the packaging industry have in the future?

Explosive growth of new brands brings new business opportunities

Against the backdrop of consumption upgrading and the post-pandemic era, the consumer market has ushered in comprehensive innovation. Some brands became instantly popular online through marketing, while others were boycotted by users due to negative public opinion; for brands, anything is possible. On the other hand, capital's enthusiasm for new consumer brands remains undiminished, consumers' preference for domestic products is growing day by day, and the tide of new consumption is surging.

Data from Qichacha shows that 4.165 million e-commerce-related enterprises currently exist nationwide. In terms of registration volume, the number of newly registered e-commerce-related enterprises nationwide reached 965,500 in 2019, approaching the scale of a "million-strong army". In 2020, China added as many as 1.5 million new e-commerce-related enterprises, and in the first half of 2021 a total of 570,700 new ones were added.

The common techniques some new brands use to become popular mainly include two aspects: first, content seeding; second, eye-catching packaging. Therefore, the explosive growth of new brands is absolutely a huge business opportunity for the packaging industry. In particular, intelligent packaging product factories with both low-cost small-batch packaging and large-batch rapid purification capabilities will be the biggest beneficiaries.

High-appeal product packaging

Everyone has a love of beauty, and this is especially pronounced among Gen Z. For Gen Z, the first glance at a product usually determines whether they will buy it. Products with high visual appeal can break the ice with consumers faster, and only after the first trial can experience and repeat purchases be discussed.

NielsenIQ survey data shows that compared with non-Gen Z respondents, Gen Z respondents have an obvious tendency to be "appearance-driven"; when purchasing food and beverage products, they pay more attention to product packaging appearance than non-Gen Z groups. In the past year, the proportion of them increasing spending on food and beverage products with high packaging appeal and strong design sense was significantly higher than that of non-Gen Z respondent groups. For food and beverage brands, capturing Gen Z's taste buds is important, and attracting their eyes is also important.

In recent years, color boxes and gift boxes with a strong sense of design and exquisite printing have become market favorites, and have also become one of the few growth highlights in the packaging industry.

Capture domestic brand customers

Young people love to buy domestic products. According to the 2020 China Consumer Brand Development Report, 80% of the goods consumers buy on Tmall are domestic products. Alibaba Vice President Liu Bo said: "Today, the choices of the post-95 generation differ somewhat from those of many post-70s and post-80s. The post-70s and post-80s regard international brands and overseas online shopping goods as symbols and guarantees of high quality, and even as their desired consumption targets. But Tmall finds that the post-95 and post-00 generations are more interested in China's emerging brands and in brands with innovation and rejuvenation capabilities."

According to the 2020 Insight Report on the Rise of New Domestic Brands released by QuestMobile, a mobile internet big data research institution, new domestic brands are local domestic brands that combine brand and quality, continuously transform digital marketing, win consumer attention by creating value points for segmented functions, and possess a certain degree of popularity and emotional added value. Their important characteristic is that young people such as the post-90s and post-00s have become the main force of consumption.

Domestic brands continue to gain momentum and usher in explosive development. According to the 2020 Report on Cities of New Domestic Brands, the market share of domestic brands in the Chinese market reached 72%. Live-streaming e-commerce will further help new domestic brands "overtake on the curve". According to data from iiMedia Research, the transaction market size of China's live-streaming e-commerce will reach 961 billion yuan this year, with a growth rate of 111%. New domestic brands may be able to use their instant interaction and timeliness to accelerate the capture of more consumers' hearts.

In the past, having one or two major foreign brand customers in packaging meant an endless stream of orders and generous profits. This situation is now reversing, and new domestic brands are expected to become the main growth point for orders.

Functional food packaging

Data shows that the market size of China's functional food in 2019 was 358.58 billion yuan. Wuling, general manager of Tmall's Big Food Industry, once said that functional food is expected to reach a 500 billion market in the next few years, of which functional snacks are expected to account for 150 billion.

Along with consumption upgrading, functional food shows the characteristics of a younger consumer group and diversified product forms. According to CBNData's Young People's Health Consumption Trend Report, more than 90% of young people have health awareness, the consumption share of the post-90s and Gen Z in functional food is rising year by year, and forms such as gummy type and jelly type are growing significantly.

If packaging factories consciously develop such customers, future order growth is guaranteed.

Currently, China has become the world's second-largest cosmetics consumer market. According to information released by the National Medical Products Administration on January 14, the number of cosmetics manufacturing enterprises with licenses in China has reached more than 5,400, the number of entities registering and filing various cosmetics exceeds 87,000, and the number of validly registered and filed products is nearly 1.6 million.

Other data shows that from 2015 to 2019, China's total retail sales of cosmetics grew from 204.9 billion yuan to 299.2 billion yuan. In 2020, the total retail sales of cosmetics in social consumer goods reached 340.02 billion yuan, and the overall market size of cosmetics consumption shows a trend of steady growth.

On August 25, JD.com released the 2021 Back-to-School Season - College Students' Online Shopping Fun Insight Report, which shows that post-00 college students love spending money on color cosmetics the most, with the transaction value of men's sun protection and color cosmetics sets both growing by more than 270% year on year.

"Back-to-school season on the map" also shows interesting regional consumption characteristics: universities in North China and Northeast China have a relatively high proportion of book consumption, universities in East China have higher spending on online computer purchases, universities in South China and Southwest China have a higher proportion of spending on skincare and beauty, and universities in Central China and Northwest China have a higher proportion of spending on sports and outdoor goods.

The overlap of the lipstick economy and the era of male beauty has driven the boom of the cosmetics industry. At present, leading enterprises have set their acquisition focus on cosmetics packaging enterprises. If you have the opportunity to develop cosmetics customers, do not miss it. For many traditional packaging enterprises, the packaging industry's many categories, broad depth and endless hotspots are an important guarantee for their smooth transformation and upgrading, but more and more capital and people from outside the industry have set their sights on this pie, new challengers are arriving one after another, and uncertainties will only increase...

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-378711.html