Page 26 - Print21 July-August 2022

PacPrint
Print’s marketing power
HP Indigo press owners user group Dscoop convened a forum at PacPrint, with a lively presentation on champion teamwork from Mark Winterbottom, and then the power and possibility of digital print for brand owners, by Little Bang Brewing Company’s founder Ryan Davidson. Lindy Hughson reports.
Teams and technology as a foundation for business success was the theme
of the Dscoop forum at PacPrint, with colourful
insight brought by Australian motorsport legend Mark ‘Frosty’ Winterbottom and Little Bang Brewing founder Ryan Davidson.
Kelvin Gage, global board member and treasurer for Dscoop, opened the event with a snapshot of what Dscoop is all about – a community forum for HP Indigo owners and users, which number more than 15,000 and who gather at events around the world where content and ideas are shared to deliver access
to knowledge, innovation, and inspiration, while also providing commercial opportunities for the businesses in the group.
Champion racing car driver Mark Winterbottom had been invited to talk on teamwork. “To have fun at work in our sport is everything,”
he said. “But making sure that everyone's in the right roles and working for me is the big part [that determines success]. So, you've got to earn their respect and you've got to have the right people and you've got to deal with emotions.”
He said that when he is driving, the team on the track side looks to him for guidance, “and if you’ve got your head down you won’t see them... it may come down to getting your head up in confidence so they can read the signals. That’s a lesson in there for any leader – pay attention to your teams, and show them what you’re thinking.”
He spoke also of the difficulty of losing staff poached by a competitor. In an environment like printing, with skill shortages, many audience members could relate.
His next words on teamwork
also rang true: “Without the right people we don't perform. We have
an engineer on my car, we have
data engineers... we have pit crew, mechanics, truck drivers, catering, media sponsorship, the list goes on... and so if you go through the chain and one person doesn't do their role properly, we fail,” he said.
26 Print21 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Big bang for buck
Next up on the Dscoop podium
was Ryan Davidson, founder and director of sales and brand strategy at Little Bang Brewing Company,
to talk about how Little Bang’s
beer packaging had been key to
the company’s ten-year journey of successful growth. He described
how as a start-up, with a first batch of 5000 litres, buying printed cans was cost-prohibitive because of the volumes required. The short-run solution took the form of labels, more specifically digitally printed labels – printed on an HP Indigo digital press by Peacock Bros. – that enabled not only high levels of creativity and colour variation in the artwork, but also the flexibility to print different labels for every SKU.
“I wanted to turn every beer can into my little sales rep on shelf,” Davidson said. “You have to really, really push as a small business owner; we thought as we couldn't afford a sales team all over the country pushing our product it meant the product itself had to be out there doing the selling for us. On those noisy shelves, we need our beer cans to be reaching out to the punters saying, ‘For God’s sake, pick me up’ even if it's because the punter has thought ‘What on earth
Ryan Davidson at Dscoop
on HP’s SmartStream Mosaic:
even is that? I need to investigate.’ If you can have that moment of their attention... that two seconds... then you're most of the way to winning.”
Davidson discussed how the
HP SmartStream Mosaic software developed by HP Indigo and running at Peacock Bros. has created labels that “really pop”. The software can be easily instructed to keep certain graphic elements the same, while allowing others to be varied with infinite combinations – creating a dynamic set of labels that look the same but are not quite the same – piquing consumer interest.
In the Union Jack design
on this series of cans, only one part of the flag colour changed – subtle but enough
to pique consumer interest
“I wanted to turn every beer can into my little sales rep on shelf.” Ryan Davidson, Little Bang Brewery
He described how at times HP Mosaic is used only sparingly, showing an example of a Union Jack design on a series of cans in which only one part of the flag colour changed – but still that’s enough to attract interest.
The company took variable labels to the next level with its Little Bang Hazy IPA, every can had a different name – 75,000 different names
to date, meaning 75,000 different labels printed in runs of one. 21