Date: Tuesday 3 November 2026
Time: 15:30 - 17:00
Workshop leaders: Uwe Melichar, Ulrike Quirmbach
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Agenda
1. Geopolitical changes: Impact on consumption, people, and the economy
2. What responses does business need to find?
3. Consumer psychology: How do people react to crises: trust, investing, saving, postponing?
4. Trust and transparency of consumer goods in geopolitically tense times
5. Understanding consumers: psychological analysis
1. Geopolitical changes: Impact on consumption, people, and the economy
Geopolitics affects us through three channels:
The third channel is the most underestimated. People do not react to the inflation rate itself, but to the price of butter and fuel that they see every week. Perceived inflation is therefore regularly higher than measured inflation.
Lifecycle Management
Product lifecycles are no longer ended by the market; they are interrupted by procurement.
If a supplier drops out due to tariffs or sanctions, this can mean changes to:
Each of these changes triggers an artwork change.
Dual sourcing — the new favourite answer to resilience — effectively doubles variant complexity:
Brand Management
Brand promises such as “Quality from Europe” or “always available” become fragile.
Brands that have made origin part of their core proposition are suddenly geopolitically exposed.
Packaging
Packaging materials such as aluminium, paper/cardboard, plastic granulate, and the energy required for glass production are highly sensitive to energy and raw-material prices.
This increases pressure to reduce material usage, change formats, and substitute materials.
Each of these measures ends up affecting the artwork again because the die-cut shape, print design, and recycling information change.
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2. What responses does business need to find?
The usual responses — “resilience, diversification, strengthening trust” — are not answers; they are headings.
Instead, the question needs to be framed as:
Which decision does whom need to make, and by when, in order to create predictability?
Business
The answer lies in reducing complexity rather than increasing the number of variants.
This includes:
Consequence for Lifecycle Management
Regulatory deadlines become the most important milestones in the product lifecycle — more important than marketing-driven relaunches.
Anyone who does not combine PPWR requirements with already planned relaunches will pay for artwork changes twice.
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3. Consumer psychology: How do people react to crises: trust, investing, saving, postponing?
Precautionary saving
Under conditions of uncertainty, the savings rate increases, even when incomes remain stable.
Germans are already world champions in this respect.
The option value of waiting
When people are uncertain, they postpone irreversible decisions — buying a car, renovating a kitchen, purchasing a property — because waiting buys them information.
This is not irrational; it is economically sensible.
Loss aversion
Psychologically, losses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains.
A 50-cent price increase hurts more than a 50-cent saving feels good.
Polarisation instead of uniform behaviour
There is no such thing as “the consumer in a crisis.”
There is simultaneous trading down (private labels, discount retailers) and trading up for small rewards (the lipstick effect — the good deodorant, premium chocolate).
The same person buys private-label pasta and an expensive perfume.
Anyone who segments their target audience by income alone will not understand this behaviour, because it is segmented by category and emotional function.
Trust is asymmetric
Trust is built slowly and lost quickly.
Shrinkflation is the prime example.
France has required labelling in retail since 2024, and the issue has been intensively discussed in Germany.
Consumers are more likely to forgive price increases than hidden reductions in pack size, because the latter feel like deception.
Packaging and brand
Here, packaging becomes either a carrier of trust or evidence against the brand.
Every reduction in contents while keeping the same pack size is now potential social-media material.
Honestly designed packs that adapt their size to the amount of contents, or openly communicate changes, will become a competitive advantage in the medium term, because consumer protection organisations and algorithms will do the rest.
Lifecycle Management
When consumers postpone major purchases, the lifecycles of durable goods become longer.
For Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), demand shifts towards:
Exactly these special formats generate a disproportionately high amount of artwork work per unit sold.
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4. Trust and transparency of consumer goods in geopolitically tense times
Consumption has always been central.
What is new is that the traditional drivers of growth are under pressure:
This is why hopes are being placed on domestic consumption.
Viewed soberly, this is hope born out of a lack of alternatives, not a strategy.
The problem is that consumption cannot be ordered or imposed.
If you tell people, “Consume so that the economy can keep running,” you are more likely to achieve the opposite among an uncertain population.
The mechanism is the same as with the phrase “Stay calm”: it signals that there is a reason to be worried.
The opportunity
If consumption is the bottleneck, those who genuinely understand consumers will gain.
Power is shifting from the production side to the demand side.
For brands, this means that relevance is becoming more important than reach.
For the packaging industry
Packaging is the last moment of the purchase decision at the shelf and therefore, in a hesitant consumption environment, an economically underestimated lever.
When consumers take longer to consider a purchase, the pack matters more:
What specifically creates orientation and clarity?
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5. Understanding consumers: Psychological analysis
The consumer
In times of crisis, people seek control.
Saving, postponing, and comparing are all forms of control-seeking behaviour.
Brands that give people back a sense of control — through transparent prices, clear quantities, and reliable quality — build trust.
Brands that take control away — through hidden changes, greenwashing, or confusion at the shelf — lose trust more rapidly.
Companies
Companies also react like uncertain consumers:
They save, postpone investments, and hope that the situation will pass.
The irony is that they display exactly the behaviour they criticise in their customers.
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Giveaway:
Postcards
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