New Ideas

Every company needs to stay contemporary. Some call it ‘re-inventing’ yourself, but that is not really the same thing and can be dangerous. When Coke‘re-invented’ its formula with ‘New Coke’ it nearly sunk the company. A company does not want to change its core values and the underlying product and/or discovery that made it successful. What a company does need to do is keep up with changing tastes and needs while staying true to itself. Coke has subsequently been successful in bringing to market new products that allow consumers to choose something different occasionally without going to the competition.


The same is true for all other companies and industries. The packaging industry needs to stay on top of the latest in packaging products, designs, trends and needs. The core products should offer the latest in technology, but still effectively do the jobs they were invented to do. Adding new electronic components to the original unscrambler or capper is staying contemporary without ‘re-inventing’. Adding a new line of products that compliment the original line is staying contemporary without ‘re-inventing’.

Let’s leave ‘re-inventing’ to the celebrities and focus on staying contemporary with our packaging machinery. If a new product comes on the market that requires a new machine to process or package it, design a new machine as a compliment, instead of changing an already good design to try and make it something more. The ‘something more’ may turn out to make the original machine ‘something less’, especially if it makes it more complicated, harder to use, more expensive, and have capabilities that are not always needed by the purchaser. Ten years ago I attended a PMMI meeting with end users. They all agreed that they were looking for machinery that would run faster, allow for quicker changeover, and be easy to use and maintain. Customers today are still asking for the same things.

The author, Marge Bonura, is the Director of Sales & Marketing for New England Machinery, Inc. (NEM). NEM is a leading manufacturer of bottle unscramblers, cappers, orienters, retorquers, lidders, pluggers, pump sorter/placers, scoop feeders, hopper elevators and much more. The company has been in business since 1974 selling to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care, chemical, household products, automotive and other industries. For more information on NEM, visit their website at http://www.neminc.com/.