An op-ed by Sandra Joly Guicheteau, Deputy General Manager and Head of Consumer Branding at Lonsdale, originally published in French by Stratégies – November 2025.

In a time when brands compete with AI to manufacture “engagement,” another form of intimacy endures: the intimacy of touch. Product design and packaging represent the most sincere and lasting bond between a brand and people’s everyday lives.

Packaging isn’t dead—far from it. In fact, it is becoming one of the last territories where genuine emotion survives. As brands accelerate under the influence of AI, multiplying content to generate ever more engagement, one anchor point remains stronger and more enduring: the product, and its design.

The Race for Intimacy

The new race among tech companies—and therefore among brands—is the race for intimacy. Creating closeness, personalization, emotional connection. But this intimacy, calculated by algorithms and optimized through data, is only the illusion of warmth: it imitates a relationship without ever truly living it.

And yet, there is a form of intimacy no AI can replicate: the intimacy of touch. Holding a product in your hand, opening it, smelling it, keeping it. That experience cannot be measured in clicks; it belongs to the realm of the senses, of gesture, of the everyday.

If you think about it, a product’s design or its packaging are the only brand elements we literally bring into our lives. We touch them, unwrap them, keep them, sometimes even gift them. They enter our homes, our routines, our emotions. They become daily companions, visual and sensory markers that extend the brand far beyond its words.

For some, they go even further: they awaken memories. Nivea’s blue tin, Nesquik’s yellow box, Tropico’s parrot—these “emotional comfort objects” trigger childhood nostalgia, summers, familiar gestures. They prove that design can create a sincere, time-rooted relationship.

When Everything Looks the Same

Brands have never had so many tools to express themselves. And with AI, they can accelerate everything, produce everything, generate everything—words, images, campaigns—in an instant. But by trying to feed platforms and seduce algorithms, brands risk becoming indistinguishable. When you create for machines, you produce attention, but forget beauty, uniqueness, and the tangible. Creativity dissolves in the stream; identity fades behind the chase for immediate performance.

In this context, design becomes essential again. It’s what makes the brand exist in the hand, in the eye, in the real world. It’s what creates difference when everything else is becoming uniform.

Apple, Toblerone, Carambar: each has turned design into a universal language. And Ricard—true to its object-driven culture established by its founder—continues to embody this vision and elevate design into a popular language. Its latest innovation—a bottle designed to be drunk directly—follows the same logic: a simple, immediate, sincere gesture, where its iconic yellow once again becomes a symbol of connection and conviviality.

A simple truth

You can convey an entire culture without a single word—through shape, color, and material alone. Product design and packaging are the tangible proof of a promise kept. They embody what the brand stands for, in a world saturated with generated messaging.

And perhaps real modernity doesn’t lie in the pursuit of artificial engagement, but in rediscovering human connection through objects. In a world where brands are driven by data, true value may soon be measured not in clicks, but in impressions—those left by the objects that inhabit our lives.