Media packaging - where has planning gone?

Unbelievably, this year, there is a shortage of boxes. This is the result of an absence of planning, argues MARTIN WATSON, Sales Director at Coral Products. Customers need to better understand the suppliers' modus operandi.

Many years ago, I cut my selling teeth in the cosmetics industry. An industry and a marketplace where all forms of packaging were – and still are – essential to the desirability and ultimately the saleability of the product, even if occasionally the content leaves a little to be desired.

In many ways that is not so different to the recorded media. Both industries rely heavily on both basic packaging to be an intrinsic part of the product – perfume bottle/library case – and value-added packaging to provide the customer with extra reasons to buy – beauty collections/TV & genre compilations. More importantly, both industries rely heavily on pre-Christmas sales to underpin their annual business.

But in one key area the two industries are worlds apart: The area of pre-planning for the peak season.

During my comestics industry years, I vividly remember my employers shutting off at the end of May for all Christmas orders; it was always the Friday preceding Bank Holiday Monday. Anything ordered after this date was plunged into the lap of the gods as to whether it would reach the store in time for the pre-Christmas selling season. The driver behind this? To allow the company’s packaging suppliers time to manufacturer sufficient products in time to meet the higher than usual demand.

How different from our own disc box industry. If planning schedules exist they must be guarded like the crown jewels. Studios and distributors large and small seem to treat the entire supply chain with little thoughts given to the processes involved. Surely, there are exceptions to this sweeping statement, but in the main it seems that the process of getting discs into boxes isn’t given a second thought. As each year goes by this is becoming increasingly part of the magic of Christmas!

One year it was bound to go wrong – this is the year.

So what happened this year? More to the point, where are all the library cases? Across Europe from the Emerald isle to Bucharest, judging by my inbox, we have an industry facing a library case drought of biblical proportions. Stories of boats, lorries and even planes, rushing in additional supplies from remote sources abound. (Goodness knows what that has done to Europe’s CO2 footprint reduction plans!) But why is it so? Europe has a real-time capacity close to or even in excess of demand, doesn’t it ? That’s why product prices are so low and manufacturers’ margins so thin, isn’t it?

Certainly, on an annualised basis there are ample supplies of products manufactured locally. This year, though, the problem appears to be twofold: Confidence & Planning.

Consider the first 6-7 months of this year. More or less flat, mundane, unexciting. No ‘buzz’, no excitement, no enthusiasm. The only discussions with customers revolved around demands for yet lower prices against a tide of almost weekly rising raw material costs. No need to remind you that plastics are a petro-chemical product, and we all know where oil price has gone this year – up! Against a background of soaring costs and an absence of forward planning, which manufacturer will have the confidence to build huge stocks with the expectation of selling all they could make? As it turns out, none of us!

Market planning this year has been, in the main, non-existent or at best coming at the eleventh hour. Could we all – manufacturers and customers alike – have done anything differently? Yes, of course. Planning. Realistic forecasts are the lifeblood of the library case industry. “Tell me what you need when you need it and it will be ready.” For sure, manufacturing library cases, like any other product, is not a perfect science. It takes time and is subject to mechanical, logistical and all manners of unseen hiccups.

This is not a whinge, it is a plea. A plea to our industry. Keep your packaging supplier close. Hug him/her, love him/her, trust him/her. Share your innermost thoughts and plans with him/her. Visit your suppliers’ facilities, understand the process. It will reap dividends.

Trust me, there is nothing more gut wrenching than having to turn down a client because the request for supplies came to late and cannot be fulfilled. We are only human. We need to know what and how many units you need and when you’ll need them – and I don’t mean the day before street launch!

Will we learn from this year? Will we work closer together to plan ahead of time and make sure 2007 never happens again? I sincerely hope so, but in the back of my mind are little voices getting louder as January nears, soon ready to ask me “What’s your lowest price? – Too high – We’ll buy somewhere else.”


Martin Watson is the Sales Director of UK media packaging company Coral Products. He has worked in the media packaging field for some 17 years having previously been the European Sales Manager with one of the other larger manufacturers. He is the public face of Coral interfacing with most of the major UK & European replicators in parallel with studios and distributors....

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