Metal packaging: a marketing tool

Steel and aluminium containers enable bringing out the full potential of a product’s value. These completely recyclable packaging types offer many advantages in production. A testimonial by Mirato.
Editorial communication by the Association

Mirato is one of the major players in the market of hygiene and beauty: an industrial manufacturer that is Italian through and through but ever increasingly international in scope, able to meet the most diverse and particular requests.
One of the concern’s fundamental strengths lies in brand identity, and brands like Malizia, Intesa, Splend’Or, Geomar, Clinians and Breeze can count on immediate recognition and the loyalty of a broad base of consumers.
Interviewed by ANFIMA*, Alberto Pollini, commercial and marketing director of Mirato, explains how packaging represents an important marketing tool.

In the sectors of bodily hygiene and personal care products, the market is rapidly and continually evolving. What are Mirato’s strategies, and how important is packaging to attracting and winning over consumers?
In our commercial strategy, in addition to the communication tools of the marketing mix (advertising and promotional campaigns), we hold packaging as particularly important. It is capable of attracting and winning over consumers. With constantly changing shapes, colors and graphics, packaging is increasingly becoming a marketing tool capable of rendering the products more attractive, without of course foregoing the container’s functionality. Steel and aluminium containers enable conveying the product’s value, by means of both decoration and color. The infinite decorative and communication possibilities and the refinement of the steel or aluminium packaging have enabled us to emphasize a product’s properties, communicate its value and set apart product concepts. This is the case of Malizia (a complete line of deodorants targeting young men and women) or Intesa, both in the case of Intesa Pour Homme, the complete product line for face/body care specifically targeting the large male market, as well as that of Intesa Sex Unisex.

Packaging serves as a marketing tool, then. But are there other advantages?
The winning attributes of metal packaging lies not only in the attractiveness or uniqueness of the packaging, but also in environmental concerns.
Mirato has always kept a watchful eye on product innovation for markets in which environmental protection is a factor. Steel and aluminium packaging carry many advantages in this sense: they are completely recyclable, ad infinitum, with no loss of quality or performance. Consumers are also increasingly aware of environmental issues, both in terms of products and of recyclability.

And as far as concerns production?
Mirato is a major industrial player, and by using steel and aluminium containers, the concern manages to achieve numerous advantages in terms of production and quality, first and foremost considering weight and the lines’ high speed.
The metal containers, moreover, do not require secondary packaging and are logistically efficient. And, as mentioned earlier, other strong points are the remarkable possibilities of differentiation and total recyclability.   

*ANFIMA (www.anfima.it) is the Confindustria association that brings together Italian metal packaging manufacturers.

Metal, a permanent material Steel and aluminium are resources that are available on a permanent basis, which is to say they can be recycled indefinitely without losing their intrinsic properties. Recycling metal makes it possible to save up to 75% (steel) and 95% (aluminium) of the energy used in order to produce the raw material. Metal recycling kicks off an infinite cycle of recycling: a metal packaging can become, for example, a motorcycle, which in its turn can become a new metal packaging, and so forth, for an infinite number of times. For more information: www.empac.eu/it