Win with consumers: rethink artwork and package design

Rosemary Grabowski, global marketing director, CPG-Retail at Dassault Systèmes, a 3D experience firm, explains the benefits of such technology

With shoppers making many of their purchase decisions within five to eight seconds in-store, it is clear that packaging plays a critical role in driving CPG and retail sales.

The package design, color, artwork and position on the shelf serve to stop, hold and close the shopper to select the product that is right for them. With the decline of the effectiveness of mass media, the importance of the product impression at the shelf is taking center stage.

Given the short decision time, it is critical that CPG and retail companies ensure that their product can quickly gain consumers’ attention, communicate their value and drive them to place the product in their basket based on the communicated value versus price.

However, despite the important role packaging and artwork play in the consumers’ choice, the process for designing both are typically disjointed, with complimentary processes done in silos and little communication between contributors. To truly maximize efficiency, virtually eliminate errors, enhance brand consistency and ultimately win at the shelf, the packaging and artwork development process itself must be optimized in order to compete effectively.

A changing marketplace

Innovation is the very lifeblood of any CPG or retail company. As consumer taste profiles continue to evolve, manufacturers must regularly deliver new and different products that align with these trends.

This rapid rate of product innovation has led to a greater demand on the brand manufacturers, design agencies, packaging suppliers and artwork studios, all of whom collaborate with each other to create breakthrough designs for each new offering.

To address the resulting challenges, CPG and retail companies need to take advantage of 3D technology to turn what has been a serial development process plagued by multiple rounds of rework, resulting in sub-optimal designs, into a concurrent design process integrating internal and external organizations to create breakthrough packaging in record time.

As a result, CPG and retail companies can optimize the entire package design process, enabling them to:

•          Centralize product management and eliminates errors

•          Create concepts faster

•          Streamline artwork development

•          Minimize technical design re-creations

•          Improve technical qualification of packages

•          Centrally manage specifications

•          Undertake accelerate consumer testing

•          Design better, faster and smarter packaging

Eliminate errors and recalls with centralized product management

Without proper workflow and project management tools, many packaging projects can get stuck in resource bottlenecks, cycles of rework due to late stage changes and cost overruns due to poor coordination across a broad set of functions, organizations and suppliers.

CPG and retail companies that centrally manage complex projects inside and outside the enterprise can avoid these issues and ensure that their packaging initiative is delivered on time and on budget. For instance, an organization can leverage its best practices to simplify product start-up and standardize product execution, driving consistency of packaging products across the brand.

Additional benefits include increased resource utilizations and reduction of conflicts between project managers through improved visibility and improved decision-making through real-time access to project dashboards to expose potential bottlenecks.

Create the concept faster

Typically new package design starts with hand-drawn sketches used to help consumers imagine how they will look in real life and on the shelf. Often times, key design elements are lost in translation when transitioning into a 3D design. Taking advantage of technology that enables designers to sketch their ideas directly into 3D allows them to better visualize and share their designs with “non-creatives” and helps them collaborate with technical packaging engineers to create the perfect package. This results in the reduction of time needed to generate multiple concepts and the ability to use the same set of design tools to streamline the effort to translate concepts into completed designs.

Additionally, after receiving feedback from consumers and product teams, designers can more clearly express their design intent in revisions. With the need for CPG and retail companies to listen and monitor consumer sentiment towards their brands and how they feel about their packaging more important than ever, the ability to incorporate insights gleaned from consumers on packaging effectiveness and what needs to be changed is a critical success factor.

Streamline the development of artwork

Accelerated growth of SKUs is creating the need to develop artwork faster. The current artwork supply chain is highly fragmented, leading to increased errors. In fact, these errors drive 51 percent of recalls costing millions of dollars each.

Leveraging technology that enables CPG and retail companies to manage all elements of a package or a label in one place helps to avoid potential errors, which would result in a product recall.

Using technology that manages the development and lifecycle of labels, companies can design artwork templates and create master copy once, and then dynamically generate product artwork variants with language mapping instead of creating each piece of artwork from scratch.

They can also publish copy directly to artwork authoring tools and integrate this with an artwork-proofing tool to eliminate the chance for errors, provide digital review and comparison, and serve as the system of record for all artwork and language copy. 

By centralizing assets in one place to maintain control from copy creation to final artwork approval, companies can lower product recall rates caused by artwork errors, increase speed to market, improve brand consistency and cross-organization collaboration, and lower artwork costs.

Minimize technical design re-creations

Many times, packaging engineers need to recreate package concepts from scratch. Incompatible file formats and lack of detailed designs require engineers to translate sketches into 3D designs, which may lead to loss of key design elements. 3D technology can help engineers translate concepts rapidly into qualified designs through tight integration between styling and mechanical shape design, and conduct structural load analysis to ensure it meets all required technical specifications.

Improve technical qualification of packages

Technical qualification of packages requires either costly physical testing or performing simulations that only a few experts are able to practice. This adds weeks or months to qualifying designs before releasing them to production. With 3D technology, advanced modelers can quickly set up and run multi-disciplined simulation capabilities, simulate packaging component characteristics, assist in light-weighting efforts to improve sustainability and ensure the package delivers the desired consumer experience without the need for costly physical prototypes. This enables multiple design alternatives to be evaluated up-front in the design process, improves confidence in simulation results, enables rapid turnaround time of large models and enhances collaboration between designers and engineers.

Centrally manage specifications

Today, packaging specifications are scattered across multiple systems preventing proper management, review and control. This leads to higher costs and potential for recall issues due to lack of materials control across the enterprise. Using technology to centrally manage packaging specifications, companies can use structured specifications to build and maintain multi-level bills-of-material (BOMs), conduct “where-used” analysis and look for opportunities for packaging material savings. This significantly reduces raw material costs, increases employee productivity and reduces legal liability.

Accelerate consumer testing

CPG companies need to test their package designs with consumers before going to market. This requires conducting multiple rounds of research with consumers utilizing a number of costly physical prototypes to visualize, present and share potential design options. With 3D technology real-time visualization and photorealistic rendering provides test-consumers a true view of the finished design, both the package and the label, without the need for costly mock-ups and physical prototypes.

Designers can interactively create and manipulate packaging materials, lights and environments, and visualize the new package in real time. This allows the companies to accelerate consumer qualification and explore more packaging options in order to create the perfect package.

Better, faster, smarter packaging design

By optimizing the package design process, CPG and retail companies can lower costs and speed time-to-market while freeing up employees to spend more time innovating new artwork and packaging designs that are appealing to consumers. As a result, those brands that are more nimble in delivering products to the shelf, that address changing customer needs and preferences, will separate themselves from the competition.

Ultimately, winning at the shelf level starts with improvements at the design level.

This article first appeared in the Labels and Labeling Yearbook 2013