Getting a product's packaging right represents a big step in building a best-selling brand, but keeping its colour consistent can be just as important. Jill Park looks at how colour choice can shape a brand's future

Purple is a colour so integral to chocolate maker Cadbury that you could be forgiven for thinking its employees have the hue running through their veins. British consumers have a great affection for the Midlands-based firm, and ‘Cadbury purple' is such an important part of the company's equity that there are concerns that if its new owner, US food giant Kraft, tinkers with the historic livery, it will be to the brand's detriment.

Brands are increasingly recognising the importance of colour management. Manufacturing products on an international scale poses a particular challenge, for example, as different countries favour different types of print and it can take weeks before the finished goods arrive by ship for brand managers to check that the printed products fall within the tolerances agreed when they were commissioned.

"It is a primary driver for consumer recognition - think about Coke red, Cadbury purple, and Uncle Ben's orange, they are instantly recognisable and become part of the consumer's subconscious relationship with a brand," says design agency Blue Marlin's realisation director Shaun Jones.

Safeguarding a brand's colour becomes even more important when you consider the catastrophic impact bad colour management can have. "The inks on a brand over in Asia were run so low and thin that the shades of green had started to look grey and old and so were being left on the shelf," says LNS Print director Lee Harman.

"Reproduction and colour accuracy holds many challenges," he continues. "It's not just substrates, it can come from the inks, drying methods and varnishes or laminates used. Proofing at the design stage on inaccurate stocks or with inaccurate seals can seriously mislead the brand manager into misunderstanding what the end result will be." Relying on colour swatches for spot colours can pose problems, too, as they can fade over time.

Same, but different
The need to be explicit in commands, even for simple jobs where the process and material are the same, should not be underestimated. "Even the most simple of separations such as cyan over yellow need to be approached with a view to potential discrepancy," says Matt Leese, director of colour management firm Tag Colour. "For example, if two printers run to a different sequence the ink trap will dictate that the result of identical plates and repro may well appear quite differently on the finished sheet."

It is important to consider the peripheral print items, too. "A brand has several touch points with a consumer. Invariably, the brand dilution takes place at the most casual, such as point-of-sale (PoS)," says The Design Group's director Jerry Hall.

So what can brands do to ensure their colours remain consistent? Hall agrees with Harman that it is important to proof on the substrate you are going to use in production and to supply this to the printer for accurate colour checking. "We suggest that a diligent client goes through the process of qualifying the printers that they use. Printers have got to keep the business by the standards they produce throughout the year."

Therefore, it is important for brands to agree parameters for error with their printers and include these in any contract. Colour tolerances can be measured by spectrophotometers, which give LAB readings and the delta E - the distance from the original LAB reading you are trying to match. This means that whether or not a printer has met the targets laid out in a contract is much less subjective.

Similarly, Tag's Leese believes it is important for brand owners to include the printers in the process of colour management. "What we don't want to do is leave the print vendors out in the cold because they are a huge part of the process. It's very important that these guys buy into what we do and believe it."

He suggests a structured approach to colour management to ensure clarity for all parties of the job at hand. "[This process] liberates the print supply base and it allows brand owners or retailers to move to another printer if required," says Leese.

Matching plastics
Colour management is as important for plastics as it is for print. Masterbatch additives are used to colour polymers and create finishes on packs. According to Performance Masterbatches' managing director Dave Thomas, it's important to consider the type of polymers you are colouring, processing temperatures for the packs and the light conditions under which the resulting pack will be sold.

"By getting the colour right, masterbatch manufacturers can play a vital role in helping to ensure that the final product is an accurate reflection of the original design concept," says Thomas.

Packaging is increasingly being recognised as an important player in the marketing of a product. Leese believes that as creative agencies do more of the production work, repro houses will act as "the custodians of colour". "The management of the colour will break out of just packaging or point of sale. It will have to take into account every channel that the image will appear in - this will mean standing on the shoulders of agencies as technical eyes and ears of colour and all down-stream process."

LNS Print has worked with X-Rite, the owner of Pantone, to set up a CFX management system for its target proofing and mock-ups. "Basically that will mean a degree of spectral data is taken from the proofs or flat sheets printed at LNS for that data to be sent to printers anywhere in the world via email," says Harman. "As long as the printer is coupled up with the CFX colour system that LNS is using, it will be able to match colour exactly."

Tools are available for firms to roll out colour management on a global scale. Clearly setting the parameters and tolerances of a job could prevent problems further down the line. Explicit directions are crucial to ensuring simple errors, like printing colours in the wrong order, do not happen and, perhaps, more time should be given to ensuring consistency across peripheral items such as PoS.

While colour management processes can be adopted by companies of all sizes, big brands have been quick to recognise the power and importance of colour consistency. So there is hope that, regardless of who owns the company, Cadbury's purple wrappers will continue to strike a chord with the nation's chocolate lovers.

CUTTING COLOURS, AND COSTS
London-based design agency LFH has developed a patented colour rationalisation technology, Chapter 1, which it believes could save brands as much as £5,500 per SKU.

Over time, as a range develops, the number of colours used by a brand increases as new products come online, often resulting in more than 100 colours for one range. In order to change colours, printers have to clean the press, causing downtime - a cost transferred to the customer. LFH's technology aims to rationalise the number of colours to six to reduce downtime and allow simultaneous printing of a range of packs.

Unilever has saved considerable amounts on its Cif and Flora brands with LFH's help. Flora, for example, had 150 brands and variants, which equated to 400 SKUs. One hundred colours were used to create these, but through Chapter 1, LFH was able to reduce this to a seven-colour palette. "The results were put in front of marketing and nine out of 10 couldn't tell the difference between the old and the new," says Graham Hawkins, joint managing director of LFH.

"In the current economic climate, brands are having to work harder and smarter to maintain profitability," adds LFH joint managing director Mano Manoharan. "There are not many cost-saving initiatives that can deliver this level of visible benefits."

THE SUNSHINE SHADE
Each year, Pantone picks a colour of the year, which sets the trend for the big brands to follow - 2010 has been named the year of turquoise. Pantone's executive director of Pantone colour list Leatrice Eisman was on the committee that made the decision.

"Forecasting is much more complicated than people think," she says. "You've got to keep up with what is going on around you." For example, a few years ago Eisman picked up on the movie Shrek while it was still in production. "I was fascinated by that green for that particular demographic, children," she adds.

However, Shrek green would not be suitable for all brands. Eisman says that colour is all about context. She advises brands to consider their image and choose colours that reflect the mood they want to convey. "You've got to look around and see what others are using, because you would not want to mimic what your competition is doing," she adds.

While there are classic colour theories such as the colour wheel, Eisman says it is more important to find out about colour trends and the messages they convey. Fashions change and colours that have been popular previously fall out of fashion and vice versa. "Chartreuse was not popular for a while, but it came back into fashion in the nineties. Orange is another colour I would use as an example. At one point, it was said to be for cheap goods, but today we know that is simply not true."