Smart packaging is now reaching new levels of versatility, which is increasing its appeal to brand owners and other end-users. But despite progress in reducing costs to levels closer to those of conventional packaging, they are still a barrier to broadening smart packaging’s attraction, notably in large consumer product sectors. High growth areas for smart packaging are tending to be sectors less influenced by packaging costs such as pharmaceuticals and applications like personalization, particularly when the objective is to open up channels of communications with individual consumers. Higher costs are being offset by the increased effectiveness of marketing strategies based on the analysis of the rising quantities of customer data starting to be yielded by smart packaging. These were among the main messages from a conference on smart packaging at Cambridge University, organized jointly by the university’s Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Large-Area Elec