Over the next few months, we will be reviewing the content that emerged during the Print4All Conference last March. Today, in the words of Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè, professor at SDA Bocconi, the focus is on the role of printing and packaging in product and service communications, online and on-shelf, in the name of transparency, safety, sustainability and quality.

Products are stupid, or rather, they cannot speak for themselves. They cannot communicate their values and characteristics on their own nor can they conquer consumers at the time of purchase, either online or on-shelf.

Packaging is called to fill the gap by establishing a dialogue, or rather, a real conversation which is ever smarter and more complex, between users and products. This rings true for both primary or secondary packaging and even pushes the boundary to include the very absence of packaging, which also conveys a message or a value.

The way in which a product is presented aims at generating a stable and lasting relationship capable of making the customer loyal to brand values, narrated and testified by the packaging and information printed on it.

From the material of which the packaging is made to the information printed on it, everything contributes to creating a unique experience that involves and captures the consumer's attention. If once packaging was just the product wrapping, today it becomes content in its own right, with its own characteristics and highly customisable to win over consumers, becoming nothing short of a love letter dedicated to each and every one of them.

The experience becomes even more significant when it comes to e-commerce, where packaging plays an even more important role because it must protect product integrity, but also speak to the customer and transfer essential information in a direct relationship that has no other intermediaries.

Therefore, packaging and printing become carriers of specific values, which can be summarised in a few key words. Quality, for instance, which must express the product and its uniqueness and must trigger the "wow effect" in consumers even before they open the package, transparency, that is the ability to tell every aspect of the product - from composition to the steps of the production process - to establish a relationship of trust with users, safety and today, increasingly, sustainability of the packaging itself that, by using recyclable or reusable materials, creates a new relationship of trust and complicity with consumers, often suggesting reuse of the product in terms of circular economy and making it the ambassador of good eco-friendly practices.

In this age of online interactions, the role of packaging goes even further, becoming a marketing tool. Information is real new value and packaging from being a protection tool turns into a connection tool.

The most beautiful packages are kept (just think of Apple products, for example), photographed and triumphantly posted on social media by the buyers of fashionable products and are the focus on "unboxing" rituals, which consist in presenting a product starting from describing and opening of its packaging, increasingly more popular in online videos that garner plenty of interest.

New technologies, such as digital printing, can produce on-demand packaging tailored to each consumer, while applications, such as augmented reality, offer new the opportunities by transforming printing into an online experience. So, packaging takes a current and strategic role being the true ID of the product and bolstering its commercial success.

In short, by exploiting the most advanced printing, finishing and personalisation technologies, Gutenberg's world merges with that of Steve Jobs, leading towards a future in which printing operators will become strategic partners of brand owners and creative designers committed to developing increasingly innovative and customised printing projects to strengthen unique bonds with each and every customer.