Digital Innovations Signal Bright Future For Color (part 1 of 2)

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2020/03/13 Digital Innovations Signal Bright Future For Color (part 1 of 2)

Digital Innovations Signal Bright Future For Color

source from: https://www.flexpackmag.com/articles/90364-digital-innovations-signal-bright-future-for-color

Digital innovations signal bright future for packaging color consistency, no matter which printing process is used.

Creating consistent printed colors across different presses, substrates and inks in multiple locations is a huge challenge for brand owners.

Bobst’s REVO has succeeded in making available to converters a turnkey seven-color ECG printing process and digitalized workflow.

The power of color is well known, and brand owners use color to engage with customers in many ways. Indeed, research shows that up to 85 per cent of customers’ first impression is based on color alone, and color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent.

We all know Nivea blue and the Coca-Cola red. Color quality and consistency was and remains a strategic and sensitive topic for both brand owners, printers and converters. As technology evolves, it is important to understand the perspective of brand owners and their view on the latest developments in color management.

Brand owners at six leading global companies recently related the challenges they face around the colors on their brand packaging, and how they consider more digitalized color solutions in their packaging production workflows. The responses reflect the high pace of change in this area, as brand owners grapple with a fast-moving environment and rapidly-evolving technology. The changes driven by the Extended Color Gamut (ECG) are significant. It is the biggest driver to simultaneously improve color consistency and production efficiency while reducing cost and environmental impacts.

Consistency Is Key Color Challenge
Marc Hufschmied, senior manager R&D packaging innovation at PepsiCo, lays the situation out in plain terms. Color consistency is a must-win battle for brand owners.
“Consumers are very color sensitive, and have expectations around brand colors that need to be met consistently in a global marketplace,” he continues. “Their trust in the product encompasses packaging graphics. Packaging is the ‘last sales force’. It is vital that we adhere strictly to consistency standards and quantifiable verification systems.”

Hufschmied says that consistency is the “number one challenge for brand owners around color.” Achieving consistency has traditionally been challenging due to the sheer variety of printing processes, inks, and substrates involved.

Michele Amigoni, Group RDQ — vice president, global packaging at the Barilla Group, agrees. “Like all global companies, we have had color consistency issues,” he says. “Take a Barilla pasta box in the U.S. and compare it to one in Italy, and it might happen that you will not get exactly the same color consistency. We have standardized everything to have the same look, but it still does not always happen consistently across converters, printing technologies and runs, and countries.”

Consequences of Inconsistency
As well as diluting brand perception, issues with colors on packaging dilute brand differentiation from competitors, and for certain brands could make life easier for counterfeiters (if consumers are used to seeing color inconsistency, a counterfeit package would appear less suspicious).

There is also the matter of consistency between online imagery and real-life packaging. A recent report asked shoppers about their expectations around packaging. Forty-seven percent said they expect that the item they ordered online will look exactly the same when they see it in person. And although 37 oercent say that it’s OK to have “minor variations” between the online image and the package they receive in the mail, only 9 percent are fine with a package that arrives with different colors or imagery.

The challenges around color consistency are exacerbated by current trends.

“There are several key trends in packaging that are affecting this area, but in particular there are two main ones,” says Alvise Cavallari, packaging transversal technologies at Nestlé Research and Development. “The first is to bring packaging that is more sustainable while still ensuring the safety and quality of products. The second trend, which has been ongoing for many years, is the desire by brand owners and consumers alike to differentiate the product through the packaging.”

With the advent of big data, we know more about what consumers want than ever before, which leads to a desire to customize packaging that precisely targets audiences and markets. This inevitably means more variation, more SKUs, which requires greater flexibility, shorter runs and shorter turnaround times, putting more pressure on printers and converters. All the while, the need to maintain high quality, including color fidelity and consistency, remains.

“Runs are becoming shorter and are putting pressure on our supply chain stock level,” says Barilla’s Amigoni. “The segmentation of the market is leading to more complexity internally. We need to accelerate our time to market, and to do that we need to become more agile in all the steps of the chain, from artwork creation to approval to color separation, print and delivery.”

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