Mark Browne, European Packaging Development Leader at PZ Cussons, explores the real-world pressures shaping FMCG packaging innovation and will take to the stage at London Packaging Week 2026 in London.
In FMCG personal care packaging, innovation is rarely limited by a shortage of ideas, but it can be limited by the barriers it must clear on the arduous pathway to market.
Packaging change can appear deceptively straightforward. A new innovative format, a lighter weight package, a bigger bottle or a more recyclable structure. In reality, every decision sits inside a dense system of manufacturing constraints, procurement realities, regulatory pressure and consumer behaviour that does not always align with sustainability ambition.
It is within this environment that Mark operates each day. Mark will be exploring these tensions in more depth at London Packaging Week 2026, taking place on 16 & 17 September at Excel London, where FMCG packaging leaders will gather to examine how innovation, sustainability and commercial reality are reshaping the industry.
Within that context, Mark operates as Packaging Development Lead for the European business unit at PZ Cussons, sitting within R&D at the intersection of manufacturing execution and commercial reality. His remit spans end-to-end packaging development for core personal care brands including Carex, Original Source and Imperial Leather, proudly produced in the UK at the company’s Agecroft factory site in Salford and distributed across the UK, Europe and international markets including Australia, Africa, Indonesia and the US.
The structure behind that responsibility is more layered than a traditional R&D function. Within Europe, packaging leadership is split between Mark and his London-based counterpart, separating responsibility across internally manufactured FMCG brands and those produced via third-party manufacturing partners.
“I head up the European business unit for packaging development,” Mark explains. “I focus on the FMCG personal care brands produced in our own factory, while my counterpart focuses on third-party manufactured products.”
Within that structure, Mark’s role sits firmly within R&D, which ultimately reports into the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer rather than supply chain or procurement. It is less about managing execution and more about translating possibility into something that can survive industrial reality.
“As part of R&D,” he says. “Our role is to demonstrate the art of the possible and set about doing research and testing our ideas by leveraging consumer insights and setting a path for potentially bringing them into the business.”
That framing is important, because in FMCG packaging, possibility and viability are rarely the same thing.
The innovation funnel built on volume, timing and trial & error
Packaging development at PZ Cussons is not designed as a controlled pipeline where ideas are carefully filtered from the outset. It is structured more like an expansion system, deliberately wide at entry and tightly filtered only as concepts move closer to execution.
“Imagine it like a funnel” Mark says. “At the wide-open end of the funnel, we want as much as possible going in, no ideas are bad ideas. Then we set about the process of stress testing them with our internal marketing and insight teams, doing our research and filtering out what we feel doesn’t stack up. This means only a few of the best and brightest ideas make it through to product launch.”
The logic behind that approach is simple. In FMCG, some innovation might fail, but not because it was a bad idea or wrong. It might just be ahead of its time, and the market is not ready for it yet.
Ideas enter the system from multiple directions. Suppliers bring emerging technologies, internal teams identify incremental improvements, adjacent categories reveal transferable formats, and external partners increasingly push new material solutions into the conversation. Most of it does not proceed, at least not immediately.
But failure is not treated as a waste of time.
“It’s a case of trial and error, and plenty of setbacks” Mark says. “But we do not disregard these learnings. We bank that knowledge and keep it as a “work in progress.”
That stored learning becomes critical over time. Packaging innovation is not linear, and timing can as often determine viability as can the strength of the concept.
Something that is rejected in one cycle can re-emerge months or even years later in a different form, once industrial capability has evolved or economic conditions have shifted.
“You might revisit a supplier and find they have developed a bigger machine to increase their throughput, improved their cost base, or simply made the packaging solution better. What was not cost viable before because they were just starting up now becomes possible and the business case stacks up, or what was not efficacious before has now met the threshold of functionality to make A more compelling proposition.”
In that sense, innovation is not just about generating ideas. It is about recognising when the system around those ideas has finally caught up.
Our agility is our superpower
Unlike global FMCG giants with large-scale R&D infrastructures, PZ Cussons operates with a deliberately leaner model. That constraint, rather than limiting ambition, defines its competitive strategy.
“We are not an enormous organisation like some of the global FMCG behemoths we compete very well against on shelf,” Mark says. “We are smaller but mighty, and extremely agile. A boxing analogy is we are punching well above our weight.”
That agility underpins a different approach to innovation. Instead of trying to lead every technological shift, the business focuses on identifying emerging solutions early, supporting scaling them quickly and helping to prove them.
“Our agility is our superpower” he says. “we then combine this responsiveness to emerging technology with our ability to scale quickly into our locally loved brands, prove the concept in our European lead market and turn this success into a technology platform, creating a building block for to stack the technology globally and roll out across all of our lead markets in Asia, Africa & ANZ. PZ Cussons are ramping up our investment in R&D and unleashing this capability with clear recognition that R&D and Innovation is at the very core of building brands that engage and delight our consumers.”
In practice, that speed translates into strong category performance in highly competitive FMCG segments. In hand wash for example, Carex holds the leading position. In shower gel, Original Source sits alongside global brands on shelves in major retailers and holds a significant share of the shower category.
“Carex is the number one hand wash brand, holding that position over brands developed by global FMCG powerhouses” Mark says. “Original Source is a leading shower gel brand. We are competing with far larger organisations, but agility and technical acumen are the ‘secret sauce’ that translate to success in market.”
The advantage is our responsiveness to meeting the needs of the consumer.
The growing noise around innovation
As sustainability and material innovation have become more prominent across FMCG, so too has the volume of external input into packaging teams.
“There is a huge amount of evolution in the packaging industry, it’s a very fast-moving feast” Mark says. “I have a revolving door of sales teams from packaging suppliers touting the next big thing.”
“Regulation has turbo charged innovation, and it’s great to see the industry responding and finding solutions for brands to deploy.”
The challenge is no longer accessing ideas. It is filtering them quickly enough to maintain focus and catching and latching onto those that resonate most.
Experience plays a significant role in that process. The first judgement is not whether an idea is exciting, but whether it is relevant to the consumer.
“I can look at something and take an immediate view on whether it is relevant for the consumer based on our in-depth insights work, and then I can envisage which brand it might be a good fit for.”
From there, ideas enter a structured evaluation process involving marketing, insights, procurement, and supply chain teams. Nothing moves forward without interrogation from multiple perspectives.
“To actually get something from that first spark through to shelf, there is a huge amount of analysis and sense checking at every stage.”
That challenge is intentionally data-led. Consumer testing, category benchmarking, and global trend analysis all inform whether an idea progresses.
“It is not just ‘do we like it.’ What we like as a packaging developer or marketeer is largely irrelevant. Our Marketing Director recently coined the phrase ‘Me-search’ which I immediately stole with pride. This is the notion of us forgetting about doing our research, and just doing something that someone thinks in isolation is a great idea or even discarding it because a person doesn’t like it. Even if that is a senior stakeholder. The key metric is whether it will resonate and work for the consumer. We are not our consumers. More pertinent is if something similar been done before, what consumers thought, why it worked or failed, and what the data tells us.”
Where sustainability meets lived reality
One of the most difficult tensions in FMCG packaging sits between sustainability ambition and consumer behaviour.
On paper, alternative materials, lightweight formats and reduced plastic usage often appear like straightforward improvements. In practice, they must survive repeated, habitual consumer interaction.
Mark points to ongoing exploration in categories such as shower gel, where packaging change is not just visual but physical and behavioural.
“It sounds simple, but then you have to ask what that actually feels like in the shower,” he says. “Can you still squeeze it? Will it work better with a pump? Is the liquid viscous and does it flow well? Will people with accessibility issues be able to use it? What does the consumer want in that moment and what might frustrate them and give them a poor experience?”
This is where sustainability metrics can become misleading if taken in isolation.
“Regulations are leading us to make packaging changes by introducing punitive costs. If we make a specification change just to conform to the requirements under Extended Producer Responsibility or PPWR and improve our sustainability metrics, the consumer will not necessarily understand or even care about that reason. They will judge it on face value and if the change is something they don’t like, it will not work. You risk losing that shopper or consumer all together, and then you have defeated the purpose while they seek out another product that meets their needs. To give an example, you change your shower cap from having a nice metallised shiny finish which is appealing and evokes luxury. The consumer likes how it looks in their guest bathroom. We remove it to make it more recyclable, but you then no longer meet the consumer’s needs, so next time they buy the next product along on the shelf that still has that shiny metal cap.”
The implication is clear. Packaging decisions cannot be made in a vacuum of environmental performance alone. They must hold up in the moment of truth when the shopper picks it up from the shelf. It is in this nuanced environment that brands must operate in.
For Mark, the discipline lies in maintaining balance across four competing forces: regulation, sustainability, cost, and consumer experience.
“The real challenge is making sure we do not make decisions based on what feels right internally, but what actually works once you bring the shopper and consumer into it.”
Ultimately, Mark’s view of packaging development is shaped less by invention than by constraint management. Every decision exists within a framework of cost pressure, manufacturing capability, regulatory divergence and consumer expectation.
The UK and Europe operate as both a regulatory frontier and a testing ground for the wider global business, where packaging standards are often more advanced than in emerging markets.
“We are at the coal face of packaging development and regulation, being uniquely placed in the organisation to make a big impact” he says. “What we do here often flows through to other regions as their markets develop their own packaging regulation.”
In FMCG personal care, packaging innovation is often discussed in terms of materials, formats or sustainability breakthroughs. But inside the system, the reality is more complex.
It is a continuous negotiation between what is technically possible, what consumers want and what is commercially viable as a product proposition.
For Mark & PZ Cussons, success is defined by the ability to keep all those forces aligned as market conditions evolve.
Innovation, in that context, is not a destination. It is a moving balance point. In FMCG packaging development, it is that balance that ultimately determines what products become successful and delight consumers.
That tension between ambition and execution will be a central theme at London Packaging Week 2026, taking place on 16 & 17 September at Excel London, where the industry will come together to examine how packaging innovation is being reshaped by sustainability pressure, regulatory change and consumer expectation.