The Circular Economy
How Avery Dennison is Closing the Gap Between The Physical and Digital World with Max Winograd, VP of Connected Products
Efficiency, transparency, trust. These are all things that both businesses and consumers crave, but don’t always achieve. Especially not all with one solution. But thanks to digital identities, that’s about to change.
The technology that is coming out of Avery Dennison is taking digital identities past the point of simple QR codes and RFID tags, and into a place where brands and consumers will be able to do more with individual products than ever before. We’re talking about a world where you can track the tiniest details of a product in shipment, like its exact origins to its temperature. And brands will have the ability to create more sustainable, reusable products that can learn from consumers each time they use and scan the digital identifiers, making it possible to adapt to changing consumer behavior in real time. But where are we in this move toward digital IDS and why is this necessary? Max Winograd, the VP of Connected Products at Avery Dennison, has the answers.
“We’re actually in the early days of seeing that transformation go from something that’s maybe at the SKU level or the order level down to the individual item level, and it’s a very interesting place to be right now because we’re seeing that transformation happen before our eyes,” he says. “And it’s being driven because really at the end of the day, the demands of the supply chain and demands of consumers require having that item level visibility.”
Customers and brands want more end-to-end information for a host of reasons, including more of a focus on sustainability. We are moving away from a consume-at-all-costs mentality and shifting toward solutions and products that are more environmentally friendly.
“The idea of consumption-based supply chains will have to evolve to being able to reuse things,” Winograd says. “So whether it’s reusable packaging, reasonable containers, so that rather than buying an individual packet of M&Ms when I have a sugar rush I’m looking for, I actually can have an individual container that I can then go to the store, it’ll know that it’s my container, it’ll know that it’s me, and it’ll actually reward me for refilling and using not single use plastic or single use packaging. So I think that how we actually package products will continue to transform.
““We’re seeing a drive away from single use plastics both by consumer demand brand and push as well as regulatory outlook, particularly in places like Europe. And so as a result of that, we’re going to see a requirement for brands to come up with new ideas. So we see that that’s certainly going to be one. And then I think it’s about giving away the products and talk in very compelling ways. So right now, it’s about, if I see a product that has a QR code on it, now especially in a post-COVID world, we’re seeing that opportunity to interact with things using our phones. And I think the experiences that we can actually deliver to consumers will continue to become richer and richer so that what you actually see on a product is only one small part of the story.”
With all of the data and insights we will be getting and giving to our products, it becomes more necessary to create a place to store and analyze that information. That’s where atma.io comes in.
“That’s really the power and the beauty of atma.io, we finally have this platform to capture all of these unique digital identities in one place, all of the events that get built around a product journey in one place, and then make that available to all the different systems that otherwise talk to a product throughout its journey from an ERP to a consumer mobile app, and having that data harmonized, easily available, and able to enable people to ask questions of their products and for the products actually have a voice and for products to actually talk,” Winograd says. “And now that you can learn from the product, you can learn, ‘How do I recycle it? How do I care for it? How do I donate it? How do I know where it came from?’ All of those different questions that we all have, and that consumers will have more and more of, it’s now available in one place with atma.io.”
There is more to come on this front, and Max is sitting in the driver’s seat. To hear more from him, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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