The Color Challenge for Brands. The Solution: Digitize. Automate. Connect.

The Color Challenge for Brands. The solution: Digitize. Automate. Connect.

?One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came in 1810 from an unlikely source – the German poet and artist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, in his treatise on the psychology of colors,?The Theory of Colors, established the effect of color on people's emotions and subsequent actions.

Today it is widely accepted that the quality of a brand's color and packaging can significantly impact consumer sales, with numerous studies illustrating the impact it has on people's purchasing decisions.

?Research conducted by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo documents the following relationships between color and marketing:

• 92.6% of consumers said they put more importance on visual factors when purchasing products, while only 5.6% said that the physical feel via the sense of touch was the most crucial factor. Hearing and smell each drew 0.9%.?
• When asked to approximate the importance of color when buying products, 84.7% of the total respondents believe that color accounts for more than half among the various factors important for choosing products.?

Managing colour effectively in this volatile market environment is critical to business success. As brands seek even faster speed to market to respond to shifting consumer needs and expectations, they are seeking agile suppliers that can react quickly while maintaining color quality and consistency.?

The Color Challenge for Brands.

Color choice and management are an essential component of branding. No matter the product you are selling, you need to consider the product's color and of the packaging containing it. While picking the right color combination can be challenging, color management is essential for your brand. It conveys a unified branding message to your audience and helps customers immediately identify your brand across all mediums.

Poor color management is symptomatic of a much larger problem global brands face with regard to packaging: lack of control. Maintaining consistent color quality is tricky enough with one packaging supplier, let alone?multiple?suppliers. Color management becomes even more challenging if those packaging suppliers are located on the other side of the globe.

The Color Challenge for Suppliers.

Due to the competitive nature of today's market, brand owners are more concerned than ever with color accuracy and consistency of their packaging. With this increased emphasis on color consistency comes greater scrutiny, and the pressure on package printers and suppliers under more pressure to deliver accurate, repeatable print has increased twofold.

For the packaging or label printer, the main issues remain in press stops and rework due to unclear color or tolerance specifications. They also suffer from duplicate entry data for quality control, low equipment utilization, tight deadlines due to late information, and poor planning. An added challenge that emerged during the pandemic was how to manage on-press approvals with customers.

Today, packaging management systems for many brands and their supply chains tend to be largely visual-based and, by extension, subjective and disconnected, leaving plenty of room for error.

Brand managers need to be able to take control of their color quality process instead of relying on costly third-party systems. They need to be able to set precise, defined color specifications, and suppliers need to be able to deliver on those standards clearly and measurably.

The Solution: Digitize. Automate. Connect.

The solution to these challenges lies in digitization, automation and the connection between brand managers and their packaging value chains.

Today brand managers can take greater control of the color process with innovative solutions that help them define, implement, monitor, and report on print results. These solutions grant them greater visibility to identify and correct bottlenecks quicker, retrieve control of artwork, so there is flexibility to make changes in-house, and ultimately drive pace into their launches while protecting brand color consistency.

By automating the packaging and color quality processes, brands and suppliers can align on specification and success for color. They can eliminate any discrepancies caused by using manual processes and the inconsistency of the human eye. People and processes can be connected by utilizing software to create a truly efficient packaging workflow that includes color management. This removes the need for on-press approvals, saving up to 76% in travel expenses for press-trial runs and on-site press approvals, all while maintaining health and safety in post-Covid work environments.

?The digital ecosystem for both brands and suppliers can integrate and connect so that color is part of the overall process, right from the beginning when color palettes are initially created.?

The X-Rite Pantone digital color management ecosystem

?At X-Rite Pantone , we recognize that great color portrays excellent quality and that your business's success hinges on the consistent and accurate production of color. Data-driven color scientists created X-Rite, and by blending the art and science of color, we have helped thousands of businesses achieve the highest level of color integrity.

We have created an ecosystem of integrated hardware and software solutions to deliver the color coherence that modern brands seek.?Brands can use PantoneLIVE to specify globally possible and consistent color targets for their suppliers. X-Rite ColorCert software suite then provides tools for printers to measure their production, compare with the expected target, and deliver live feedback on improving the result. It also includes a cloud-based ScoreCard Server that reports production results to the brand clearly and objectively in real-time.?

To Conclude

We certainly have come a long way from the days of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Through digitization, automation, and connection, brands can develop and communicate clear achievable color standards and tolerances for the packaging of each product or project. Everyone in the supply chain speaks the same language, have complete visibility, while the automated digital color workflow reduce and minimize mistakes.?

For packaging suppliers, time and manual work is minimized with ColorCert jobs arriving ready-made. Objective scorecards also support quality control with fewer on-press approvals wasting time and cost.

For brands and their supply chains to move from simply measuring color to managing it effectively — with quality and consistency across physical and digital channels — driving digital transformation must be the key to long-term competitive success.