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

Avoid these common label design mistakes

May 2, 2016 By Doug Danosky

custom commercial labels Even the best-planned, most attractive label designs can become problematic when it’s time to print them. Keep these factors in mind when planning your next label project, counsels Greg Galeles, Manager of Plant Purchasing and Art Coordinator for T&L Graphic Systems:

Q: What should customers keep in mind regarding label design?

Galeles: Type should be simple in color. Black is best. A single color is fine. Multiple colors of type that would require a four-color printing process can look fuzzy and can be hard to read when printed.

Fonts should be easy to read. The type should not be so close together that it would be easily fill in. If your artwork includes screens with gradients, you should avoid gradients that go to zero value (fully transparent), especially into a large blank space. The longer the transition to zero, the harder it is to reproduce during printing.

Q: When it comes to artwork, what type of image files do you prefer to work with, vector or bitmap?

Galeles: Vector files are sharp and clean at any size. But they also have several other advantages that are specific to label printing. Color is easier to control. Sometimes it’s better to convert a color to a PMS solid color rather than run it as a four-color process.

Adjustments, bleeds and traps can easily be made to the file to take advantage of the flexo printing process.

In addition, vector files are more stable and are less likely to have compatibility issues from computer to computer. They are always high resolution.

Q: Who usually designs the label at the client company? How often do you get involved in designing labels for clients?

Galeles: We are not graphic artists. We do not design labels. From time to time, we have designed labels and product lines in the past, but they have been very simple in nature.

I have been in the graphics industry for 34 years in several capacities. In addition, our art department staff has a great understanding of what designs will work in the flexo process and what will not give favorable results before we go to press. We can help and advise our clients and even modify their designs within reason to help ensure that the finished product meets their expectations.

Q: What are the most common problems you encounter with client artwork? What are some simple fixes to these challenges?

Galeles: Low-resolution files under 600 dpi are usually problematic. Sometimes it may only be a small art element like a Facebook logo. People take graphics from the web to use for artwork and they are usually only 72 dpi – low resolution. These images will reproduce as fuzzy and illegible; they are almost always unusable for label designs and printing.

Fonts can also be challenging. Nobody can carry every font. Some designs have special creative fonts. The customer needs to convert them to paths or include the fonts when sending the art file.

Drop shadows do not always reproduce as well as our customers think they will. When they use creative effects like drop shadows, these effects don’t always print the same way as they appear on the monitor. Drop shadows are very rarely just black, forcing us to run jobs with them as four-color processes.

The next problem with effects is that they do not scale proportionate to the object. When customers have a logo that contains elements like shadow effects, and they have a logo that is ½” x ½” in size, the drop shadow may be equal to 25 percent of the size of the logo. Increase that logo to 2” x 2” and that drop shadow effect may only be 6 percent of the logo. In other words, the drop shadows become inconsistent at different image sizes. This is not always noticeable on the monitor, but it’s definitely obvious when printed.

Photos are great but they should not have extreme highlights or burn outs. Those spots in a photo that bleach to white will never look good printed flexo or any printing process. For best results, avoid images with lots of bright areas and lots of dark shadows.

Now that you have a better understanding of label application issues, why not download our new guide, How to Create the Perfect Label: The 5 Most Important Questions to Ask.

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