The future of digital branding and packaging: how do we realise the creative potential? Jenny Cairns, technical project manager at Pearlfisher, explains.
As a ‘technical project manager’ people rightly assume that I have the technology and production know-how at my fingertips. But, it’s not just a question of going through the motions and picking a technology out of a hat on any given day, but using creative problem solving and vision to hero a brand’s big idea and bring it to life. In my experience, the idea can be knocked back for many reasons, but my job is to overcome obstacles, prejudices and ingrained thinking to choose the optimum medium for each and every project. And this got me thinking about the future opportunity for how we use and integrate digital.
Digital is at everyone’s fingertips. It’s how we connect and communicate. And in terms of how we are using it for print and production, it’s still an emerging and developing technology. In many ways, we may feel that we are already moving on from adding names or unique illustrations on product packaging to make them special, but we shouldn’t forget what a breakthrough advancement this was – and still is. Likewise, on a purely production level, digital has enabled smaller brands to come to market and iterate more quickly by facilitating fast turnaround and providing a cost-effective option for small quantity jobs.
However, we are only just starting to see what can be achieved and digital has the exciting potential to revolutionise the influence of – and interaction with – our brands. I believe that we now need to think about, and work with, digital as we think about the power and immediacy of social media – as a way of getting ideas out there in the heat of the moment to create instant response, interest and impact.
We have seen the media industry experiment with this. On learning that more consumers buy water than newspapers, Japanese daily newspaper, The Mainichi Shimbun, published the daily news on a limited run of water bottles. Augmented with AR, this was a truly revolutionary step forward in responding to consumer behaviour and realising the possibilities of ‘real time’ packaging.
This is where the true potential of digital needs to creatively push forward and maximise interaction and experience on a brand level. Challenger smoothie brand Froosh – which we helped revolutionise the look and feel of its highly competitive marketplace – is known and loved for using its labelling as a manifesto for its ‘fruit on a mission’ health benefits and as a vehicle for its thoughts for the day. Not afraid of taking bold steps with its design, the brand used its labelling for a light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek political dig when it produced a limited run of ‘More immunity than Berlusconi’ bottles. The messaging was adopted and shared by consumers on, you guessed it, social media, and it was claimed that demand from retailers and restaurants wanting to stock the bottles went through the roof.
Our whole culture is much more about experiential and emotive connections and finding new ways to facilitate this. Design is – and always will be – the way to communicate a big idea in a relevant and experiential way. And, if we now think about brands as increasingly social objects, and digital as the medium by which we can challenge and push the boundaries, we have a real opportunity to create a new generation of strikingly original, interactive and memorable brands that have the power to start an immediate and impactful conversation on both a personal and cultural level.
Jenny Cairns, technical project manager, Pearlfisher
