Personalisation in Print
With personalisation a hot topic in the print industry, David Osgar asks: “how can print companies take advantage of this trend when it comes to seasonal prints?"
Shining a spotlight on the industry
Friday, 14 Jan 2022 21:53 GMT
Rob Thurston, Head of sales, Duplo UK
Keeping it simple
Customers need to automate their workflow and processes in order to make personalisation a cost-effective revenue stream. Duplo automation manages business processes for uniformity and transparency, handled by dedicated software.
Utilising automation can increase productivity and efficiency within a printer’s business. It can also deliver new insights into business challenges and help resolve them.
With EFI Fiery integration and our new partnership with Ultimate Impostrip software used for our digital cutting tables, multi finishers and booklet maker range, we take both simple and complex tasks, and automate them. This saves the customers hours of laborious work both in pre-press, set-up, and finishing.
Everyone loves a personalised product, but on a printed material it becomes very special. When you add an element like an embellishment it becomes even more unique.
Everyone loves a personalised product, but on a printed material it becomes very special”
Being able to offer personalised products to customers during special occasions makes the event much more memorable for them, meaning the product never gets forgotten. In this digital era, when personalising any object can be done quite easily, it is a big obstacle to overcome if you don’t have the capability to do it. The public want to feel special, so printers must be able to offer that level of targeted personalisation to retain their customers, but also attract new ones.
Lockdown proved that you didn’t need to be by your loved one’s side to let them know you loved them. You can send them a highly personalised printed card that is perfect for them, leading to plenty of smiles on Zoom.
Standing out
Mike Lammas, Managing director, Herbert Walkers
In theory, personalisation is a fun and exciting way to stand out in the competitive seasonal market. In reality, it can be problematic for all but the biggest players. Producing individual names on packs means that the brand needs to calculate which names would be the most popular and in what volumes each particular name would sell, which could potentially lead to a lot of wastage. Who wants a box of chocolates with someone else’s name on the front?
The alternative is a print-to-order personalisation option, but most brands and retailers simply don’t have the front-end technical capabilities to manage the data, so, although a handful of global brands have made some big PR noise around personalised packaging, it’s still quite a niche area much more suited to specialist gifting companies who can fulfil bespoke one-off orders.
Despite global brands making some noise around personalised packaging, it’s still quite a niche area”
An alternative approach to seasonal personalisation that we recommend to our customers is something we refer to as ‘versioning’. Rather than adding an individual’s name to the pack we add a location like ‘a Christmas gift from London’ for example, or a generic name such as ‘a gift for mum’ or ‘for my darling’. In the greetings card sector, we call this loose personalisation ‘captioning’ and it transfers really well to the packaging sector, particularly in seasonal gifting.
The most cost-effective way to deliver ‘versioning’ for boxes of confectionary for example, is to create a series of sleeves, all of which can be used to personalise a standard pack. In this way, the brand or retailer has the potential to analyse purchasing data from each store and adapt stocks of standard stock aligned to demand for particular captions. This means the consumer can then choose a gift specific to the recipient, while the brand or retailer avoids the costs, technical complexities, and waste associated with personalisation.
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