At Print21+PKN LIVE earlier this week, Campbell Arnott's packaging director Liza Vernalls gave examples of print executions within her brand portfolio that went well, and that did not. We caught up with her on video after her talk.
“Print is a fantastic medium and it allows you to go where you want to go,” Liza Vernalls told the LIVE audience. "It does not require big capex, it increases the pack's role as silent salesman, and enhances consumer touchpoints."
Running through examples of how her company has used print as a medium to drive engagement, and how her team worked closely with suplliers to get the job done, she said: “I’m a true believer that if you treat your packaging suppliers like business partners, you can unlock greater things.”
She explained that the advantage of making brand changes just using the printed pack is that print doesn’t affect packaging size and shape, and thus has little to no impact on the production line.
She cited the successful case study of the Tim Tam Chill Me printed packs, which not only made the bold step of changing the text on the pack from Tim Tam to Chill Me, but then also employed thermochromic ink which drove consumer engagement with the new product significantly.
Tim Tam Chill Me was a product designed to be eaten cold, the printed pack, which changed colour in the refrigerator thanks to the special inks, successfully conveyed that messaging.
“How do you register an ink that’s invisible?” Cooling made the design show up. “Anybody that you showed it to, it had that element of ‘wow’.”
Vernalls also spoke about the Tim Tam pack that was redesigned to meet sustainability objectives.
"The old design was printed using eight to nine colours on rotogravure. The new pack was printed flexo with five colours. We saved 40% in ink, solventless. 11 tonnes-worth of ink was saved across the whole range. We saved as much energy as burning 986 lightbulbs for a year, 22 cars in CO2 emissions, and 2000 showers for a year in water reduction."
Vernalls related teh case study of a print execution that was less successful, in which the team had attempted to use embedded watermarks on the Tiny Teddy pack to activate an AR engagement via the Digimarc app, but it failed because the consumer didn't know about the Digimarc app and that it linked to a video experience off the pack.
She said it was a good learning, and that Campbell Arnott's was keen to try AR again, and was pleased to be part of the AR engagement that was demonstrated off a Shapes pack at LIVE by Dreemar.
"Sometimes things don’t go to plan – but there’s always a learning that can be taken and built on," she said.
She advised: "It's important to get buy-in across different teams, and don’t assume you know what consumers want.”
