A Appadurai, country business manager of Indigo and inkjet business solutions of HP India spotlighted on digital printing for flexible packaging in his energetic and dramatic presentation at the ElitePlus conference in Mumbai.
The four pillars of digital printing, according to him, are time to market, short runs, personalization, and sustainability. Capitalizing on commercial opportunity, and delivering an “I want it now” experience is the need of the hour, he said.
Millennials are experience seekers, environmentally conscious, social media savvy, and self-oriented. They love having something unavailable to the rest of the world and they generally have a lower instinctive brand loyalty – thus personalization and hyper-local campaigns can win them over, he said.
Appadurai presented the case of the Brazilian newspaper daily Estado de São Paulo, which partnered with coffee company Café Pelé to demonstrate the freshness of its products. (Packaging South Asia has covered this in the past.) Five thousand pouches of Café Pelé’s coffee were wrapped in front-page facsimiles of the daily for circulation along with the newspaper. The campaign attempted to displace the notion that fresh coffee is available only in cafes.
This unique hyper localization campaign used an HP Indigo 20000 digital press to produce the coffee packaging and is claimed to have gained immense traction on social media with a reported 400% jump in coffee sales, and more than a million readers interacting with the campaign more than once.
The HP Indigo 20000 has a lower carbon impact than the CI flexo and gravure print systems across all impact categories, generally by a margin of 40-65 %, he said. Appadurai also shared the example of Coca-Cola’s hyperlocalization campaign, in which the beverage major brought its #ShareACoke campaign to India in 2018. The campaign was cleverly reinvented to appeal to Coke’s Indian customers by bringing relationships to center stage.
The theme ‘Har Rishta Bola, Mere Naam ki Coca-Cola’ drew on the significance of relationships, and the brand printed 12 crore (120 million) digitally printed wraparound labels in 85 days. The campaign spread to 12 languages, with 238 total relationships and 9,200 unique artworks.
Coca-Cola identified the relationships that carry the most significance in Indian society incorporating 12 languages in the campaign – Assamese, Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, English, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Gujarati, and Punjabi. Each of the relationships was accompanied by a descriptive phrase such as Daddy (My teacher. My friend), Sis (Supermodel. Super role model), Boss (Pushes me. Promotes Me), Bae (Bugs Me. Hugs Me), and Bro (Troublemaker. Merrymaker).
The campaign included digital as well as social media engagements along with consumer touch points and marketing activities based on the fact that customization, personalization, and regionalism are the biggest trends that rule the Indian FMCG space.
Another example that Appadurai shared was Hershey’s #HerSHE campaign, which used HP Indigo for three years to co-create and drive gender equity by highlighting women’s accomplishments and their impact.
Regulatory compliance and buy one press and get one free!
HP, Appadurai said, is committed to safely printing packaging across a wide range of applications, including food and pharma packaging. Its technology meets FDA, EU, and Swiss Packaging regulations for well-defined conditions of use and complies with Nestle guidance note on packaging inks, Further, it contains no UV-curing substances and no photoinitiators while meeting the industry-accepted definition of low migration ink, he added.
Throughout his presentation at Elite, Appadurai emphasized the economic benefits to flexible packaging converters in using a digital press for short-runs and personalization, thereby freeing up their gravure press capacities to great economic advantage. In closing, he invited the audience to come to the HP stand in the networking space behind the conference to sign up for an HP Indigo flexible packaging press as several converters have done recently, boldly saying, “By purchasing an HP digital press you will get a gravure press for free.”
