David Luttenberger, Mintel’s Global Packaging Director03.22.23
Package innovation is most often evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This means it takes significantly more time to evolve compared to the fast pace of global beauty trends and package technologies.
For that reason, in 2023, Mintel’s trends tact was to address the greater forces impacting beauty and personal care brands and package manufacturers, rather than simply re-address and provide updates to such current top-of-mind packaging challenges as recycled content, mono-material structures, and refills.
What is PESTEL?
PESTEL is an acronym for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal.Our decision to look at BPC trends and packaging through a PESTEL lens, at Mintel, is based on the fact that currently there are so many extraordinary outside forces on package innovation and the packaging supply chain.
A PESTEL analysis is a framework used to analyze and monitor the macro-environmental factors that have an impact on an organization, company, or industry. It examinbes the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal factors impacting global packaging evaluations, planning and decision-making.
It enables brands and package manufacturers to examine, discuss and act against forces coming from outside their organization and beyond their control, vs. a SWOT analysis, which focuses on challenges internal to a brand or package manufacturer.
Our report, "Mintel’s 2023 Packaging Trends: Packaging from a PESTEL Perspective" provides checklists, data points, case examples, and expert points of view. (Download Mintel's report here.)
Across the six PESTEL areas of focus, the analysis focuses on beauty and personal care brands in the post-pandemic environment—where value rules and social norms are challenged, and politics and legislation often blur environmental truths.
Specifically, with self-care and wellness being driving forces as outlined in our report, it has become challenging for brands. Beauty brands need to address how, economically, socially, and responsibly, to create product and package solutions. But consumers are also seeking experimentation, social responsibility, and value—at both traditional retail venues and online ecommerce.
This means package manufacturers must deliver physical, emotional, visual, digital and even environmental attributes that mesh with beauty and personal care consumers' changing lifestyles and purchasing capabilities to remain fresh and relevant.
What Does Mintel's PESTEL Analysis Reveal?
What this PESTEL analysis reveals, going forward, is that new levels of insight, proactivity, and inclusivity will dictate brand activation, package technologies, and messaging.
Key to this new perspective will be beauty and persoanl care brands—and package manufacturers—putting less emphasis on “acting sustainably”, and more on the all-encompassing and quantifiable United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These goals are clearly about more than just about attention being paid to ‘saying’ the right things and ‘acting’ like an environmental responsibly packaging producer.
