Des King: We must pay the price of promotion or live with the consequences

Packaging was being discussed (again) on Radio 4's You & Yours recently. Periodically catching this often virtuous, invariably self-satisfied daily critique on consumer affairs is part and parcel of the mixed blessing that is working from home. Actually, it isn't just Auntie that is wont to cast a beady eye in our direction. Dissing packaging is fair game for all of the national media to engage and, more often than not, enrage listeners, readers and viewers. I reckon they may bang on about our endeavours even more than we do at PN, and clearly less constructively.

Easter's a-coming, so get ready to adopt the brace position. Meanwhile, think on this: if we're consistently caught on the back-foot in the media firing line, do we actually have anyone to blame but ourselves? And it's the collective that's the operative word here, because as an industry we're anything but.

Despite the best endeavours of the likes of Incpen, the Packaging Federation, The Packaging Society et al, the industry is not of a single voice - but rather, an often fractious dysfunctional family of sector-specific vested interests mainly concerned with besting one another over market share. Healthy competition though switching tomatoes out of cans into cartons, or water out of glass into PET might be, it doesn't exactly form the basis for a united front when Grub Street comes to call.

Instead, we segue straight into scissors, paper and stone mode, and pray to God that most of the collateral damage will be borne by a hapless plastic bag.

If there is an industry spokesperson, then most likely and ever-increasingly it's Wrap. Laudable though this organisation might be in many respects, this is not an ideal state of affairs. While it might both sound and spell as though it has our interests at heart, the reality is that its primary agenda is to cut us down to size. This determines where the focus invariably lies; less being more, in terms of use of resource - rather than more meaning less, in terms of preventable real waste.

As we have neither the collective will let alone the fighting-fund on which to draw, we're a soft target. And when an opportunity comes up - as it has on three occasions over the past 12 months - to better inform consumer opinion via packaging supplements in reputable broadsheets, we largely baulk at the cost (according to the respective publishers, more so than any industry they've ever worked with). We might not make anything that people deliberately set out to buy, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be self-promoting our critical role in shaping purchasing decisions and on-going brand loyalty.

Thank goodness for Robert Opie, I say. His museum is arguably the sole institution dedicated to presenting packaging in a favourable light to the public at large. And do we support it; do we hell. After all, God forbid that one format should get a slightly larger display cabinet than another.

Des King is a freelance journalist specialising in packaging. He can be contacted by email at packagingnews.editorial@haymarket.com