5 Ways To Persuade Consumers To Ignore Your Labels

February 19, 2019 By Doug Danosky

Experts tell us that packages and labels on crowded store shelves have an average of three seconds to capture a consumer’s attention. There are a handful of ways to help ensure this happens. But there are a myriad of ways to increase the odds that they will ignore your label.

Here are five of the most common label design practices you should avoid, illustrated by a series of “What if?” scenarios:

1. Lack of color

Bright colors are one of the primary tools that consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers use to grab consumer attention as they visually scan store shelves. What would happen if you selected a drab or indistinct color scheme for your product labels? This would almost guarantee that it would fade into the background and will be quickly dismissed by busy shoppers.

As you develop a color scheme for your brand, pay careful attention to color psychology. In other words, colors make us feel different ways. For example, blue tends to connote calmness or professionalism. Purple is often regarded as a color that communicates wealth or wisdom. Finally, yellow communicates warmth and energy.

What qualities do you want associated with your brand? Select your color scheme accordingly, and consider doing some customer research to validate and refine your decisions.

2. Unclear package information and instructions

In recent years, consumers have become much more demanding about package and label information. If your labels and packaging aren’t aligned with their expectations, your products will almost certainly be ignored. What if you took your best guess at the information your customers want to see on your labels? Then you run the risk of misjudging their needs.

To understand what they’re looking for, you need to have a deep understanding of your customers and their needs. For best results, conduct consumer research to help steer your label design decisions in the right direction. It will also give you insights on the information your customers want to see on your labels.

3. Indistinct branding

Lackluster branding is a certain route to packaging and label oblivion. Most consumers expect to see a strong and consistent brand on the products they buy. If they can’t tell what your brand story is and what it stands for, they will tend to overlook your packages and labels on store shelves.

Brand familiarity tends to favor incumbent or well-known companies. But smaller CPG manufacturers can benefit by creating distinctive, bespoke brands that align with the values and aspirations of younger consumers. Often, the labels of these packages tell a story through their designs that appeal to a particular demographic. For example, the rise of craft beers, distilled spirits and wines from short-run producers have created an explosion of highly memorable, quirky and attractive brands, labels and packaging.

If you’re not sure how customers will react to your branding, conduct some research with them. Show them several possible brand designs, and ask them for their visceral reactions. You may be surprised by what you learn!

4. Use stock images and common fonts

Consumers are very savvy. They want transparent, authentic experiences in their lives, including the products they buy. They can immediately tell if a brand looks too “slickly” packaged. Stock photography may be easy and inexpensive for consumer product goods manufacturers to procure and use. But it can easily become a crutch that hurts your brand image and, ultimately, your sales.

As we discussed earlier; labels that have a hand-made or home-grown look to them can be very effective in capturing the attention of younger consumers because of their authentic look. When in doubt, test prospective designs with your customers to zero in on those they respond to the best.

5. Designs that don’t reflect your brand story

Once you have crafted the backstory of your brand, the next step is to design labels and packaging that align with it. For example, if your CPG product line emphasizes organic foods, your labels should probably utilize a more traditional, hand-made look – not a slick, colorful label that looks like it came from a world-famous consumer brand.

One of the biggest mistakes food manufacturers and distributors make is failing to create a brand story. Remember: This part of your brand is a differentiation tool. By occupying a space in the minds of your prospective customers, you increase the odds that your product and its brand story will stand out when the consumer is standing in front of your product category in the store aisle. Not having a brand story – or a poorly written one – will make it more likely that consumers will ignore your products.

For best results, talk to your consumers. Ask them questions to determine their current perceptions of your brand. From there, develop a plan to move them in the direction you want them to go. This is a process that you will need to work on consistently and gradually.

In addition, keep in mind that retailers need to understand what makes your products different or better before they will devote precious shelf space to them. In other words, your brand story matters more than you think!

Conclusion

There are thousands of products and brands competing for consumers’ attention in today’s store aisles. Don’t leave your label design to chance. Invest the time and effort to develop a distinctive, attractive and differentiated brand that will stand out, sell well and delight consumers!

Road Bumps On The Way To Getting Great Labels

October 18, 2018 By Doug Danosky

It’s not uncommon for label printing projects to encounter bumps in the road on their way to completion. These problems often include a design that looks great on your computer monitor but doesn’t look the same on press. Or, maybe the colors on the label don’t match your brand standards. Another very common road bump is missing fonts and artwork that your label printer needs to make sure the job is a success.

Not to worry. Here are some of the road bumps and pot holes you may encounter on your next label job and what to do to fix them.

Road bumps and how to avoid them:

Attempting to do accurate color matching from a computer screen

No two screens display color exactly the same way, nor do they match up with the way in which a flexographic press prints colors. This means that what you see on the screen may not match what comes off the press.

The only way to determine exactly how a label will print is to run a proof on a printer that is calibrated to the exact color settings of the flexo press. At T&L, we use a color match proofing system to ensure our label colors are spot on, every time. We don’t eye-ball it, we let a computer do the match

Here’s how our system gets the color spot-on, every time: We utilize a high-end digital proofing printer that is calibrated to the exact color profile of our flexographic press. We show these proofs to the client and also give a color matched proof to our press operator, so he has a precise understanding of the color values that must be achieved on press.

Most label printers don’t have a color match proofing system which makes it much harder for you to imagine what your job might just look like, or NOT look like..

Sending incomplete art files

Sometimes, we receive artwork in the form of a PDF file and frequently the file doesn’t contain all of the data we need to create a high-quality label. Missing logos and fonts are often the stumbling blocks. If we’re lucky, we can re-create the artwork but this process gets complicated because of the huge number of fonts that are available today.

The best format for label artwork is EPS. This file format contains the vector and font data we need to successfully complete the project.

There’s a difference between digital and flexographic printing

Often, food companies will trial multiple variations of products and labels as part of their consumer research process. They will produce small batches of products and will digitally print 100 or so labels of each variation to be used in limited-run consumer tests.

Once the food company has finalized their product and label design, they use flexographic printing to produce the labels in quantities, because it is much less expensive than digital on a per-label basis.

There’s only one problem with this approach: Labels produced on a digital press will not look the same as those that are produced on a flexographic press. Many digital presses are doing color matching of label designs using a range of 6 to 8 colors whereas a flexographic press will typically use just 4 colors to properly match them. It’s more accurate.

The best solution is to use printed proofs whenever possible.

Properly formatting vignettes in label designs

A common mistake we see in label designs is improperly formatted vignettes. Vignettes are gradient screens and often, they are formatted using a color range that goes all the way to zero (gradient fades to white) . A flexographic press cannot accommodate a gradient screen value of zero and as a result prints the file incorrectly.

Taking a proactive approach, T&L we typically open the file and adjust the gradient to print correctly. In other words, we don’t simply run the files a customer gives us – we take steps to ensure they will print properly, saving you time and money.

We are here to help dodge these bumps in the road. Ask us a question

Flexographic vs. Digital Label Printing – Which is Best for Your Labels?

March 8, 2017 By Doug Danosky

Selecting the right printing technology for your labels depends upon a number of factors, including the quantity of labels needed, the label material and ink you require and any special treatments, such as laminating or die-cutting of your labels.

Flexographic printing advantages

For sheer variety of label materials, finishes and inks, flexographic printing offers a significant advantage over digital printing. In addition, most enhancements, such as lamination, die cuts and other special treatments, can be done in a single pass on-press. To do the same with digital labels usually requires separate offline processes.

For longer print runs, the unit cost of flexographic printing tends to go down steadily, as the cost of plates and label stock becomes spread out over a larger number of finished labels.

In addition, flexographic printing enables you to tweak ink colors as needed to match your brand, by adding other colors to them on press. In contrast, digital inks are somewhat of a one size fits all and depend upon the file specific digital profile to achieve the desired match. In short, you’re dependent upon off press digital file alteration as well as trial and error to obtain the desired result.

Flexographic printing disadvantages

For short print runs, flexographic printing tends to be more expensive than digital, because it requires the production of printing plates. In addition, the dot patterns it produces aren’t as tight as those a digital press can create.

Digital printing advantages

For certain applications, digital printing’s higher resolution gives it the edge versus flexographic printing. Also, digital doesn’t require the production of printing plates. That means you can tweak the design of your labels as needed without incurring additional pre-production costs.

Digital printing disadvantages

As label print quantities increase, the cost of digital printing plateaus compared to flexographic printing. That’s because digital inks tend to be 20 to 30 times as expensive as those used in flexographic printing; in addition, in most cases they must be certified to print on specific label media. This cost disadvantage multiplies even faster for full-color labels; they tend to become cost prohibitive to produce more than 10,000 labels.

Digital printing is also limited in the types of inks that can be applied to label media. For example, metallic inks are not available, and most digital printers cannot print graduated tints – a printing technique that requires variable dot sizes.

Which printing technique is best for your label application? Contact us to discuss your needs. We’re here to help!

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