One pack, every screen: is your packaging built for omnichannel?

Jason: Omnichannel originally meant a shopper who’d go to a discounter and then top up at their local supermarket. Now it’s everything. For us, omnichannel is really connected commerce. It’s about how our brands show up – whether that’s in store, online, on a billboard, TV or radio. It encompasses the entire shopper journey, a bit like the traditional marketing funnel: driving awareness at the top and loyalty at the bottom.

At Lactalis, I frame it around whatever the shopper’s mission is. What problem are they trying to solve? In the world of cheese, they might be sorting the kids’ lunches that week, or working out what to put on a jacket potato. They might have just watched a fantastic episode of Bake Off where someone made a tiramisu trifle, so they go on to Deliveroo looking for mascarpone. How do we show up there?

Shoppers don’t shop in categories. Shoppers shop by mission. They’re trying to solve a specific problem, and we’ve got to make sure we’re available to solve it for them.

If you ask me that question in a year’s time, I think omnichannel will mean something slightly different. It needs to be flexible enough to adapt as shopper behaviour changes.

Jason: Packaging is your key marketing tool. It’s the one thing communicating to your customer at all times. But you’ve only got a limited amount of space, and in the physical store it has to carry certain legal requirements, like traffic lights and the product name. It isn’t as easy as putting a picture of a brownie on the front of a pack of ricotta and saying, go and make ricotta brownies. That doesn’t quite work.

Digitally, you’ve got a bit more leeway. We’re trying to remove unnecessary noise and have clean packs with really clear messages, following the four Ws so people understand what the product is, what it’s for and what size it is.

Online, the biggest thing is that it’s got to stand out on that mobile phone screen. The one piece of advice I give all our teams is: stop looking at your packaging on your lovely 55-inch monitor and going, “Oh, that looks beautiful”. Open it up on your mobile phone, put it in a two-by-one-centimetre square and ask, “Have I got stand-out there?”

With a product like ricotta, it’s impossible to drive lots of different usage occasions from the pack. So the image has to make it really clear what the brand is, what the product is and what size it is, and we’ll try to have only one message on pack. Ricotta has a Great Taste award, for example, but when we put that roundel next to the pack image, it added white space and made the pack look smaller on screen. That one’s still a work in progress.

That’s where your secondary images and carousel become important, to get across how the product can be used.

Jason: Everything we do now, we’re looking at two audiences: the human audience and the machine audience. I don’t believe most shoppers buying cheese are opening up the product description page and interrogating the description, the secondary images and the videos. I think your product page is all about driving machine discoverability.

Five years ago, we were probably guilty of taking a trade press release and going, “That’ll do as a description”. Galbani would talk about being the number one cheese in Italy. I don’t think customers really care. They want to know what the product does. Can I use it in a salad? Can I use it in a baking dish?

People aren’t going into ChatGPT and typing ‘cheese’. They’re asking, “What’s the best cheese for a barbecue?” Take mozzarella. It’s effectively a sponge – it soaks up flavour – so it’s a great substitute in Asian or Mexican dishes. If a shopper is thinking about what cheese would go into that, we want mozzarella to show up.

We’re nowhere near the stage yet where shoppers are building grocery baskets with AI agents. But I think it will come.