Page 34 - Print21 magazine Mar-Apr 2023

Business
Print industry commentator Gareth Ward assesses the multiple dynamics impacting the world of labels.
Labels lifting presence
Take a bottle of gin or vodka. It contains a clear liquid which cannot be identified without opening the bottle and sampling the contents. Add a label however and that anonymous liquid becomes an artisan product, lovingly hand crafted with local flavourings peculiar to that region and a complete contrast to major brands of gin and vodka that are known throughout the world. The modern consumer has fallen in love with the artisan product and it is the label that tells the story.
And without the marketing budgets that the brands owned by mega-businesses Diageo or Suntory have, the label is the point of contact between the producer and the consumer. The label has to do more than inform consumers, while carrying statutory warnings, bar codes and ingredients. It has to sell the product.
PACKVERTISING
In recent years the awareness
of what has become known as packvertising has increased. The World Advertising Research Council (WARC) carried out research into the effectiveness of the marketing channels open to brands, from television and social media to print and cinema. It found that sitting between online video and social media as the most effective channels that influence a purchase was the packaging of that product. The case in point is the way that Coca Cola has used labels to promote sales of its soft drink.
Back to the vodka and gin. The use of colour, varnish effects, and especially foil, are used to tell a story about the product, and to position it as a special luxury item, compared to drinks that carry a
plainer label. If a unique number, identifying the bottle as 173/5000 produced say, there is another emotional trigger acting on the consumer’s psyche. We all want something unique.
SAMPLE
Producing unique labels works too with the mass brands. Absolut and Smirnoff vodkas frequently use labels to create a unique look and feel for the bottles, stretching brand identity. There are ways to sample a small portion of a larger digital image, moving around the image each
time so that no two labels are the same. HP’s Mosaic is the best known of these tools and has resulted in some high-profile campaigns for these brands. It works well because it achieves the uniqueness that consumers desire but there is no need to change the way the supply chain operates to accommodate the technology. All that is needed is a digital press.
Interactivity with the product
is equally expanding fast. The augmented reality triggered through a tagged image or more likely via
a QR code on the label, was first considered a promotional device linking to a fun video or a web page, where a consumer could upload their own content, perhaps a self-portrait of the purchaser enjoying the product, to win recognition or a prize.
In its 2023 Global Packaging Trends report, research consultancy Mintel says that QR codes should provide something useful to the consumer, say access to nutritional information or the back story of that product to provide further transparency on how and where it was produced. It advises, “Avoid the temptation to dazzle with interactivity that delivers nothing
beyond a gimmick. Consider how smart packaging can add value by providing the right information/ support at the right moment.”
The information accessed through the QR code might also include how to reuse or recycle the container after use, in line with perhaps the biggest driving factor for labels in the current market: sustainability. Consumers and therefore brands are shunning plastic wherever possible.
For labels this means labels
that must separate easily from the packaging they are applied to, yet hold fast until that point; it means replacing single use plastic films; for some it means eliminating backing paper and going linerless, or at least collecting and recycling liner and the excess matrix that remains after printing.
34 MARCH/APRIL 2023