Promotional labels get personal

Studies have shown that a well-designed product can lead to increased sales. Holidays and major sporting events also can mean a boost in sales for CPGs. So for brands looking to make push more product from store shelves during these times, special promotional and seasonal label and packaging campaigns are a match made in retail heaven.

Nielsen recently conducted market research exploring brand packaging design and effectiveness. The researchers say that packaging is the only marketing tool that reaches 100 percent of buyers at what Nielsen calls ‘the first moment of truth,’ when between 50 and 80 percent of purchase decisions are made.

Perhaps no one knows this better than craft beer. In North America, the Brewers Association says that seasonal beers are the second most popular beers, behind IPAs, with annual sales eclipsing 17 million USD.

Personalized labeling is a top trend for brand owners looking to engage one-to-one with consumers.

Coca-Cola has proven to be a leader in this arena with several successful promotional label and packaging campaigns, including the blockbuster Share a Coke that is credited for growing sales for the company for the first time in 10 years, after a decade of steady declines, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. Oreo saw success with its customized, colorful packaging that the company launched for the holiday season in 2015. More recently, KitKat created successful web-to-print personalized packages for its chocolate bars.

‘We have seen many successful examples, including Share a Coke and Kit Kat, generating new excitement for well-known, mature brands,’ said Ravit Spiegel, HP Indigo commercial marketing manager. ‘The common thread in these successful campaigns is the customer making a personal connection to the product.’

A million to one

Similarly, Parra Chocolate, an iconic chocolate bar in Israel, was looking to revitalize its veteran brand in order to attract consumers in the coveted 18-34 age range. Strauss Group’s Parra brand chocolate bars are to Israelis what Hershey’s are to Americans, Cadbury to Britons, and Toblerone to the Swiss. A cow is Parra Chocolate’s most ubiquitous mascot and has adorned the package since the brand was born in 1934.

But in recent years, the veteran brand was facing competition from imported chocolate. Strauss Group wanted to innovate its Parra Chocolate packaging without changing the product, or losing the cow, or its legacy. Strauss Group turned to Ilan Print, a commercial printer based in Ashdod, Israel, to create one million unique labels for a one-time omni-channel promotion. ‘In Israel, everybody grew up on that brand,’ says Ilan Print VP of marketing, Eran Friedman. ‘The brand felt they need to speak to the young generation. They wanted to do something to have the younger generation feel engaged again with the brand.’

Behind the scenes, Ilan Print worked round-the-clock shifts for 10 days to complete the project, which included wrappers printed six to a sheet on an HP Indigo 10000 digital sheet-fed press. One million unique designs were automatically generated using HP SmartStream Mosaic from 17 seed patterns using scaling, transposition and rotation.

Strauss Group went a step further, turning the wrapper into an art project by providing the directions for consumers to turn the wrapper into an origami cow – a nod to its mascot.

When it launched in January 2016, Strauss had introduced a wide-ranging media marketing campaign that featured TV advertising, billboards and social media sweepstakes with its origami projects. The company asked consumers to tag images of their creations on Facebook and Instagram to win prizes.

Friedman says: ‘When you are a printer that is capable of a project like this, it means you’re not a digital printer like the rest. You have made a mark on the industry. I say to customers, “We are not just printer.” We are creating an experience for our customers, we’re creating a product that’s more than just colors, more than just ink on paper. This is showing our customers that we can do things that are unique.’

XY project

While Strauss Group used packaging to revamp a veteran brand, some print companies are using labels and packaging to promote themselves.

Multi-Color England recently did just that with a personalized campaign it called ‘XY’ that sent wine bottles with unique labels to 1,000 customers. The traditionally flexo company wanted to highlight its digital capabilities. The labels were printed on a HP Indigo WS6600 at an MCC sister site in Scotland.

Paul Piper, creative marketing and digital communications at MCC Daventry England, explains: ‘We’re a flexo printer mainly, but we wanted to come up with a campaign to show our customers what’s possible, to show them what we’re capable of.’

The company teamed with its design partner at Studio Parr for the labels, each with its own unique image. Though the company wanted to flex its digital muscles, it also took elements of flexographic printing for the XY project. MCC England and Studio Parr took CMYK inks from its flexo presses and mixed the inks with opaque white varnishes to create a brightly colored loose liquid ink look that took its own shape as the liquid moved.

‘We wanted that hand-crafted feel, even though it’s a digital project we wanted to use the inks we use on our flexo presses. It gave us quite a nice look.’

Unlike Ilan Print, which used Mosaic software, MCC took painstaking efforts to photograph 1,000 different images as the ink moved. The company numbered the labels and printed the names of the customers to whom they sent the bottles. Finally, some commercial materials and brochures were also sent to clients along with the wine.

Not only were the results visually stunning, but customers reacted well to them, too, Piper says. ‘‘This was purely about personalization and connecting with our brand and consumers and making them feel special.’