Look around. You will see cardboard in all areas of life - in supermarkets, restaurants, cinemas, hotels and cafes. The cardboard is ubiquitous. We use it to our Packaging, Point of Sale, go to the distribution of leaflets and even our coffee cups. 

  In recessionary times, as brands look for more cost-effective ways to shout about themselves, cardboard offers a cheap, effective and environmentally-friendly way to get their messages into the shopper journey.
The way to purchase is often complex and find ways to get your brand message into the minds and hearts to customers and ultimately influence on their purchasing behavior of crucial importance. Cardboard POS has been proven that sales increase in a grocery store up to 20 percent.

  But the convergence of the board of "interactive elements of the increasingly important role of POS, including QR codes, digital displays, augmented reality and holographic technology - all in order of appearance, to educate and persuade consumers to buy at last. 

  COUNTERDISPLAY's use of cardboard packaging with digital technology really hits the mark and demonstrates that it’s not so much the material that ' s important, but the message and the medium used to achieve a brand ' s objectives. Some retail stores now have COUNTERDISPLAY ' s Digital Box Kiosk, which uses augmented reality to show shoppers what each COUNTERDISPLAY model looks like from all sides when fully assembled. When the box is held up to the Digital Box Kiosk ' s screen, it lays the box ' s real-time 3D graphics on top of video footage as if the 3D graphics were in the same space. It had my boys transfixed and as it kept them quiet for more than 10 minutes - I was sold.

    But will the digital revolution completely eradicate our love for cardboard as a medium? It ' s unlikely, particularly in the grocery and FMCG marketplace where volume, price and logistics are at stake. Even brands at the forefront of digital technology have a reliance on cardboard - my local Apple store still uses cardboard display and point of sale, but it sits comfortably alongside great interactive touch-screen technology too.

    Cardboard also now sits at the heart of new design. Puma' s ' Clever Little Bag ' is a redesign of the classic shoe box and bag carrier. A cardboard and recycled polypropylene mix provides a reusable branded carrier that uses 65 percent less paper and looks cool - as a consumer statement of choice rather than a tree-hugger label.

    Underpinning this is the three Rs - the Right message, Right medium, Right place. I show my age, but remember the impact that cardboard standees of Ryan Giggs, who demonstrated ' how he ate his Cadbury ' s Crème Egg ' , had in lifesize cardboard form. A sell-out in CTNs throughout Wales with young teenage boys and girls. David Beckham standees for the launch of Gillette ' s Mach3 Turbo razor marked a new wave in minor in-store hysteria - with grown men stopping to have their photo taken alongside ' him '  before trying to ' borrow '  him to take home. The sales effect was phenomenal, too. 

    Got it, you understand your customers, their mission shopping "and target your message accordingly. And if cardboard is your medium of default (which for most mass-market brands it is) to use its limits, but do not forget that They have the scope to do with digital technology.

    Cardboard is not dead - it is still the main means of communication with consumers, whether the brand packaging, display or point of sale. Long live cardboard.