The package of a product is a silent vendor. After analyzing a total of 1,170 scientific papers focused on packaging, the following five points have been concluded:
First, two main sectors constitute the focus of packaging studies from a marketing approach: food (connected to nutritional aspects) and tobacco.
Second, the child–adolescent market is a promising target for packaging designers.
Third, packaging innovation is still a priority. More specifically, how to improve packaging materials to protect the environment.
Fourth, active packaging has evolved towards “sustainable packaging”.
Fifth, consumers’ attitudes towards packaging materials cannot be forgotten.
In sum, the future relies on sustainable and healthy packaging concerning different agents involved in packaging decisions: retailers, marketers, consumers, and producers.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Software
Our bibliometric analysis allowed a quantitative analysis of all scientific publications indexed in the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus, containing the key words ‘packaging’ and ‘marketing’. To this end, SciMAT software was used (Cobo et al., 2012). As Muñoz-Leiva, Porcu and Barrio-García (2015) have explained, the SciMAT software uses co-work analysis to identify the interests and aspirations of academic researchers; thus, ‘[t]his technique reduces a large set of descriptors (or keywords) to a set of network graphs that effectively illustrate the strongest associations between descriptors’ (p. 682).
Sampling
To define the sample, the key words ‘packaging’ and ‘marketing’ were used together. The search was only done in the English language. The robustness of this method can be seen in Cobo, Chiclana, Collop, de Ona and Herrera-Viedma (2014). As they recommend, a de-duplicating process was applied over the keywords. The author’s keywords and the Keywords Plus were considered to help group words that represent the same concept. The initial sample included 82 papers indexed in Scopus and 1130 indexed in the WOS. These 1212 articles were screened by removing duplicates and papers without year of publication, considering 1170 scientific papers in our final sample. Moreover, 14177 citations within those papers were recorded and analysed. The period embraced was from 1957 (when the first indexed paper was published) to 2019.
To answer RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3, citation analysis was used. This is a method of tracking publishing patterns based on the assumption that a heavily cited author, paper, or book is considered important by a large number of scholars in a discipline (Kim and McMillan, 2008).
To answer RQ4, two scientific maps were obtained and compared for two consecutive periods of time: (i) from 1957 to 2014, with 699 documents; and (ii) from 2015 to 2019, with 472 documents. The generic terms ‘packaging’ and ‘marketing’ were eliminated to a better approach the most used words in this field of research. These two periods of time were identified because the number of published papers increased exponentially in 2016, doubling over previous years. Not in vain, Nemat, Razzaghi, Bolton and Rousta (2019) pointed out that one of the reasons for the increasing number of publications about food packing design in consumer recycling behaviour ‘could be a larger awareness of the environment impact of food and food packaging waste’ (p. 4).
To better understand the usefulness of the SciMAT software to carry on longitudinal analysis, see Montero-Díaz, Cobo, Gutiérrez-Salcedo, Segado-Boj and Herrera-Viedma (2018).