With the increasingly fierce competition in the daily chemical industry, brands are increasingly affecting consumers' purchase behavior of daily chemical products. Brand owners of daily chemical products also do not hesitate to publicize their brand views and values through a large amount of investment in various media, hoping to guide consumers to choose and be loyal to their brands.
When consumers are faced with a dazzling array of products on supermarket shelves, purchasing decisions and behaviors often only take a few seconds. In layman's terms, when you are pushing a shopping cart past a product, its appearance does not stop you, and it will not be possible for you to hold it in your hand and put it into the shopping cart. At this time, product packaging becomes the last "weapon" to seize consumers. Therefore, successful daily chemical brands not only pay attention to publicity in various media, but also pay more attention to the shelf effect of products. Especially when a new product is launched, a packaging that can stand out among many similar products on the shelf and firmly lock the consumer's eyeballs is very important to the marketing of the new product.
When we visited the packaging and printing companies of service brands, we found that many visionary bosses have realized the importance of transformation. They feel that a packaging and printing company must not just be a box, label or plastic bag manufacturer, but should be transformed into a packaging solution provider for brand owners, and should assist brand owners to complete brand management and increase brand value. The concept is that it is very difficult to change, but how to do it is the question that really tests business managers. Packaging and printing companies can try the following aspects for brand management.
1. Start with color to improve color consistency;
Color should be what packaging and printing companies are best at, and the most important way of expressing products on the shelf. The brand's proprietary color must be completely consistent in different packaging forms, different product series, and even different sales locations. (Insert pictures with different colors in the flexible packaging and color box in the PPT). For example, the red of Coca-Cola, the blue of Head & Shoulders, the orange of Tide, etc. Different packaging methods use completely different materials and printing methods. If a company considers this issue from the perspective of a packaging solution provider, the packaging company should completely provide brands with consistent color services for all packaging such as cartons, color boxes, plastic flexible packaging and labels. Packaging pre-press color management on the market is often limited to a specific printing method, but Esko’s packaging and pre-press solutions can cover glue, concave, convex (including flexo printing), silk and digital printing. Flexible packaging and labels provide overall color solutions and assist packaging and printing companies to provide color consistency services for brand owners.
2. Provide finished draft production services to ensure the consistency of design style; in
addition to color, the consistency of finished draft design is also very important. Brand owners usually have a product image design department, which is responsible for formulating the overall appearance of a specific series of products in a certain season. The style guidelines are then distributed to subordinate design or finalized production suppliers to complete the packaging production of thousands of products throughout the season. The final confirmed manuscripts are processed before printing and then distributed to packaging printing plants to complete packaging production. The reason why big brands have to go through such cumbersome steps and spend huge manpower and financial resources to complete manuscript production is precisely because big brands realize the importance of consistency. Just imagine that if consumers get two product packages of the same brand with different formula text sizes and fonts, their confidence in the brand will definitely decrease. Packaging and printing companies can use some automated content management tools and dynamic finalized content production tools to provide brand owners with finalized production services without increasing costs. For example, using Esko's dynamic content engine and plug-in tools can automatically complete multi-language packaging and draft production based on the design template, and assist brand owners to achieve consistency.
3. Provide the management of digital assets;
the final printed files of brand owners are usually stored in printing houses and some plate making companies. In addition to this part of the documents, brand owners also have many documents such as structural design documents, photographed product pictures, formula ingredient lists, design guidelines and design elements, and final documents, which are managed by different suppliers. These files are all digital assets and belong to brand owners. Brand owners hope to be able to effectively and reliably control all digital assets.
This can not only control the safe distribution of assets, but also improve communication efficiency and asset reuse. As packaging and printing companies deal with the end of the supply chain, they have a natural advantage to provide brand owners with high-quality digital asset management. Companies only need to consciously pay attention to the digital asset management needs of brands, and use some software and hardware tools to build digital asset management services to solve major problems for brands. Esko's web saint system can fully connect to pre-press and production management systems, and provide digital asset management, approval management, and packaging project process management services based on the network platform to achieve the ultimate goal of brand management.
4. Provide project management;
each brand business will set up a packaging project manager to track the progress of the packaging project at any time and ensure that the packaging is delivered on time is the most important responsibility of each packaging project manager. Generally speaking, when each new product is ready to be put on the market, brand owners will set a shelf time, and then calculate the delivery time point of each step from the shelf time and the time consumed by each link in the supply chain. For example, if it is put on the shelf after 8 weeks, the structural development may be completed in the first week, the graphic design in the second week, the packaging production in the fourth week, the product in the sixth week, and the logistics delivered in the seventh week. Each link must accurately complete the task according to its own delivery date. Once a link is delayed, it will put pressure on the subsequent links. When the entire supply chain involves dozens of suppliers and the number of projects is several hundred, project tracking management becomes an extremely complex and tedious task. Similarly, Esko's Wangsheng system can effectively manage packaging projects, provide real-time packaging process management based on the network platform, reduce the cost of brand owners, and shorten the delivery cycle of finished products.
5. Provide personalized carton network order receiving, printing and cutting services;
With the increase of customer requirements and the intensification of competition among packaging companies, packaging orders are getting smaller and smaller, designs are becoming more and more novel and complex, and more and more post-processing materials are used. At the same time, the delivery time required by customers is indeedincreasing.Shorter. Packaging companies are facing very high cost pressures, and orders that haveprinted 10,000 sheets are already considered long orders. Packaging enterprises in order to fight order single, usually must provide a free physical proofing, this is a very time-consuming, costly work. Esko's 3D packaging simulation software can provide customers with online 3D simulation in conjunction with Wangsheng, and can submit order information directly on the web page. Combining digital printing equipment with Esko's Kongsberg small-batch production equipment, it only takes 1 to 2 hours from the customer's network order to cutting out the real carton. Not only can the waiting time of customers be shortened, but also the proofing cost of packaging companies can be greatly reduced. Esko's virtual shopping mall software can also provide virtual shelf services, providing reference for brand owners to accurately grasp the shelf effect of the final product.In short, because the development trend of the packaging industry must be shorter and shorter product update cycles, more and more processes, smaller orders, and more orders. Managers of packaging companies must change their minds and define the future of the company as a supplier of packaging solutions for brand owners. The above 5 points can provide limited help to enterprises. Bringing differentiated competitive advantages through innovation, ensuring that the right colors are obtained the first time, maintaining profits without sacrificing service and quality, doing everything possible to shorten production time, and cooperating with partners with professional knowledge must be each responsible Managers need to seriously consider issues.