What We Learned from the unPACKED World Tour

Earlier this year, Alex Hunt and Matt Salem, authors of unPACKED, traveled across New York, London, New Jersey, Chicago, Geneva, Paris, Shanghai, and Singapore to meet with leading CPG companies.

They shared a clear point of view. How to use behavioral science, proprietary data collected at scale, and AI to better predict outcomes and make stronger decisions. While the focus is packaging, the approach applies more broadly across the marketing mix.

Across every city, one part of the discussion landed immediately. The vignettes in the book.

These vignettes are based on interviews with clients. They reflect the real situations teams face every day. Managing complexity across portfolios. Balancing innovation with brand equity. Aligning stakeholders while under pressure to deliver growth.

Clients recognized them quickly. They saw their own organizations, their own decisions, and their own constraints.

That recognition mattered. It gave teams a clearer way to describe challenges that are often hard to define. It also made the conversation more direct. Less abstract. More connected to the decisions in front of them.

A few themes came up consistently in every market:

• Decisions happen faster than teams expect, and often with less conscious effort. This creates a gap between how packaging is designed and how it is experienced.
• Strong outcomes come from combining creativity with evidence. The goal is not to limit ideas, but to refine and strengthen them.
• Scale improves confidence. Large, consistent datasets help teams see patterns and make better choices.
• A more predictive approach can extend beyond packaging into other parts of the marketing mix.

The markets were different. The challenges were not.

Teams are under pressure to move faster, reduce risk, and make decisions they can stand behind. What the tour showed is that many are looking for the same thing. A clearer way to connect what they know about behavior to the decisions they need to make.

If this reflects how your team is thinking, we would welcome a conversation.

Meet the Authors

As CEO of Behaviorally, Alex Hunt transformed the company into a market-leading data intelligence partner for the world’s leading brands. An in-demand speaker and thought leader, he is a Market Research Society Fellow and member of the Board of Directors of the Insights Association. A native of the UK, he lives in Connecticut with his wife, Pam, and daughter, Gabriella.
Matt Salem, SVP at Behaviorally, has spent over 20 years researching how packaging influences shopper behavior. Known for turning insights into clear, actionable stories, Matt brings a natural, dynamic style to both public speaking engagements and everyday conversations. He’s a proud parent to Niessen and Nyla and resides in New Jersey.