Marketing Opportunities Of Retail Ready Packaging – The Case Of Croatian Food Manufacturers

Retail Ready Packaging (RRP) has become a very common on today's retail shelves of fast moving consumer goods sector as a form of packaging that encompasses best characteristics of both secondary and primary packaging. Although greatest benefits enjoy retailers through more efficient in-store operations, manufacturers also seek for better RRP optimization. Therefore, retail (shelf) ready packaging requires great attention in all aspects of its creative and functional designing and implementation, which entails considerable costs, mostly for manufacturers. While significant attention was given in the literature to RRP benefits for retailers, this paper consider RRP from manufacturers’ point of view. The survey study among food manufacturers in Croatia was conducted in order to find out how demanding and comprehensive the RRP introduction was and what are the key benefits that can be recognized and utilized as marketing opportunities for manufacturers. Results suggest improvements in impulsive buying of a product and faster shelf replenishment as most valuable factor of RRP for food manufacturers. Additionally, RRP serves as a tool for manufacturer-retailer cooperation improvement. Finally, manufacturers usually implement RRP in up to 6 months’ time frame, almost exclusively in cooperation with other supply chain members. Therefore manufacturers should utilize mentioned marketing functions of RRP in order to most effectively turn the inevitable RRP cost into increased retail sales of their products.