Brand owners use colour to connect with their customers in a variety of ways. Studies show that up to 85 percent of first impressions are based on colour alone and that colour increases brand awareness by up to 80 percent.
Bobst has worked with brand owners of leading global companies on Digitised colour solutions in packaging production. The answers reflect the High pace of change in this area.
Above all, the changes brought about by the extended colour gamut (ECG) are significant. It is the biggest driver for improving colour consistency and production efficiency while reducing costs and environmental impact.
„Colour consistency is a must for brand owners,“ says Marc Hufschmied, Senior Manager R&D Packaging Innovation at PepsiCo. „Consumers are very sensitive to colour and have expectations of brand colours that need to be consistently met in a global market.“
Increasing digitalisation and automation are also changing packaging printing.
„Greater digitisation enables shorter production lead times, shorter print runs, improvements in colour consistency management and better efficiency,“ says Agustí Mercè, Product Operations Planning Manager at the global pharmaceutical company Almirall.
The digitalisation of the flexographic printing process (DigiFlexo) has created an exciting middle ground and closed the gap between what digital printing can achieve and conventional flexo technology.
„Digital and DigiFlexo options are attractive. We are currently looking at them to see how they can help us achieve shorter operating times and more colour consistency,“ says Michele Amigoni from the Barilla Group. „This makes the process more standardised. Digitised colour solutions not only ensure greater consistency, but also a faster time to market, better inventory management and good opportunities for data collection and analysis. We are currently trialling DigiFlexo for label printing in particular.“
In the near future, it is expected that The same orders with different technologies - flexographic printing and digital inkjet printing - without differences in colour and quality. Digitalised closed-loop solutions should also make it possible to achieve digitised print consistency worldwide.
Bobst recently worked with Ink-on-demand (IoD) and DigiColor presented two innovations. The Ink-on-demand colour system is a revolutionary Colour management system in UV flexo printing, which is suitable for labels, flexible packaging and folding carton applications. The clean and intelligent system works with just 30 grams of ink per print unit and offers a Consistent print quality with high speed and productivity as well as sustainable operation, simple operation and high flexibility.
DigiColor, the first closed-loop colour control system, goes one step further: the colour tone of the ink delivered to the printing unit can be automatically digitalised during the printing process be adapted.
„A closed-loop approach to colour consistency is an extremely effective concept and very interesting,“ says Alvise Cavallari from Nestlé. „If we can use process colours with a closed loop system, then we can ensure that we achieve the stability and consistency that we need.“
For brand owners, this means the certainty that their brand packaging fulfils the Desired effect of the brand colours always keep.
Source: Bobst
