Packaging is evolving faster than ever as an important toolkit for brand managers to ramp up the demand, to drive consumer affinity and to drive sales. Many consumer brands are seeing this medium to communicate with their customers, to drive home the key brand messages, to chart the benefits and key differentiators. To achieve this one to one communication in any other media, they have to spend millions of rupees and still can’t be sure of it’s reach.

Packaging remains as the most potent tool in the kitty of brand owners to engage their consumer base and prospects. Gone are the days, packaging was an outer shell to protect the product and to differentiate between products on the shelf. While it evolved as a new medium, came the challenges to make the best out of it. And to roll out new packaging in virtually no time against the long New product development cycle of the past.

The increasing number of product SKUs, new variants, flavours and packaging types, promo offers makes it tough for brand team to release artworks with the perfection and uniformity it demands. Company policies and stricter regulatory frameworks makes it all the more difficult to balance between the branding and regulatory declarations.

First of all brand manager shall keep track of all contents that goes into packaging, based on various factors – product, SKU, variant, packaging type, flavours, market, product properties etc. The declarations, product spec, nutritional value tables, expiry and storage details, manufacturing locations, license declarations, bar codes, all of it can vary basis many factors.

Brand managers can’t no more rely on the agencies and printers to get it all right at the first instance, as they need to deal with too many changes without knowing the ground realities. Also, the supply chain constraints, the need to roll out products at speed across markets lead to produce packaging with multiple production partners.

With the increasing corporate responsibilities and thrust on brand purpose, activists and social media is watching with a set of predatory eyes to celebrate even slightest of errors or deviations.

Every company will have very well laid out rules for the approval of new packaging or change in packaging. It’s all the more important that the top leadership of various functional teams approve the artworks after proper due diligence. Any lapses in this process can make things worse at different stages of packaging production to roll out in the market, it can even affect the consumer trust in the marketplace. Slightest mistakes lead to product recall and delayed launches, costly affairs in today’s marketplace where cut- throat competition is the norm. Out of shelf clearly means out of mind and winning back the consumer from another brand seems challenging now.

Brand managers are equipping themselves better by using various tools to help them manage the packaging. These tools like Artwork approval management system helps them to have the repository of all artworks at one place. They can run through the history of approvals, easier to pull out an approved artwork for a specific SKU or for a flavor precisely for a plant. Entire approval iterations are recorded clearly with comments from various departments. For certain segments like Food, beverages, alco beverages, pharma the mandatory declarations are most important aspect on the packaging. To keep up all latest versions of these declarations, they need to have proper data matrix which is available in few clicks.

The artwork approval management tools also help to adhere to the processes defined as part of the SOP, as deviations from these are costly. These systems can ensure that the same is followed in letter and spirit. The tool helps to remind those miss out on timely review and act as a reminder mechanism to complete approval on time. The daily summary of tasks, escalation of pending tasks from team members, the ability to know the current stage of an artwork review are other benefits offered by these tools.

The tool also makes the agency and creative partners responsible for timely delivery or for increasing number iterations/ lapses. The ability to annotate or input the changes precisely on the artwork reduces the effort to communicate them to the agency partners. This alone could help in reducing the number of versions of an artwork. The easier collaboration between various departments, working from office locations or markets is another key advantage of this solution.

In today’s market which demand frequent product launches, or for company’s adopting ‘launch fast and fail fast’ mode to move ahead in winning new opportunities, compressing the time to market become critical. Efficiency of packaging development can be one of the most important cogs in this wheel. To make it future proof and fail proof, an efficient artwork approval management system could be the best answer.

Xeproof is such a solution that can be deployed quickly on premise or on cloud. It could be a tool that can be managed easily with lesser learning curve. The annotation tool has features like version compare and spell check etc to make it all the more relevant for the purpose of finding lapses and errors. It can run multiple workflows helping to have various rules for different needs of packaging. For more details, Visit www.ivldsp.com/products/xeproof/

Advertising Agencies were traditionally been the connectors between the consumers and brands. The brands were built by them along with the able directions of brilliant marketers. Advertising agencies used to be the custodians of the brand, and it’s tone of voice.

Now it is changing faster than ever, the landscape is altered due to options available for a brand owner to choose from. There wasn’t a more turbulent time for advertising agencies ever in the past. Agencies are going through the challenges of the digital transformation and are at the receiving end of this onslaught. Advertising is being re-defined at every moment, leaving them with lesser controls over the marketing eco system.

The agencies got fragmented into specialized units, and competition is the new reality for agencies everywhere. The spiraling cost, reduction in remuneration and instant shift of accounts are challenges across – be it smaller or mid-sized, even true for a network agency.

The opportunity to increase their revenue depends purely on the client’s willingness to accept the contributions of the agency. While it can still be argued or demanded, the internal cost control could be achieved by deploying effective processes and technology tools. This will help the agency management with enough data and insights to effectively utilise the time of creative, studio and client servicing team which will eventually be converted into precious rupees. And while scaling up, the efficiency takes up the central role in ensuring profitable growth. But how do you achieve that, given the fact advertising functions were traditionally been managed rather reactively than being process oriented. To be true, there hasn’t been any methods to its madness!

Now with the current breed of young agency professionals who are adept in technology tools, processes and digital platforms, this becomes easier than ever. With the advent of cloud, remote access and app-based transactions, the young workforce enjoys them working on technology platforms.

The new age workflow platforms for agencies give it an important decision-making tool – availability of data. Data to measure the efficiency and utilization of resources, the delivery commitments vs actual delivery to it’s clients and insights to find new ways to increase billing. These platforms make the team more efficient by allowing them to work in the comfort of their travel, client visits or from home as well. Mobile interfaces, instant updates of completion of task, feedback from clients, deadlines, reminders through email or sms are another interesting and useful feature.

It sets the agency leadership free from issues arising out of non-compliance of process, which often lead to costly mistakes and loss of face in front of brand owners. These leads to break down of relations which can further lead to business loss to the agency. The saving of time through the faster completion of work, lesser versions of iterations will lead to major uptick to the bottom-line growth.

Xegency also has a Digital Asset Management module to store the assets and helps to retrieve them easily. The files can be downloaded by clients also when they are shared by CS team. Mobile interface allows to review the artworks and to put comments, annotations easily and act as a collaboration tool to get feedback from multiple team members.

Xegency could provide the much-needed efficiency and agility the agency team and can help them to generate reports and data required by the clients. More so with the procurement involve seriously in matters of vendor efficiency and vendor rating. The platform can be customized to suit an agency work culture, scale and to the needs of it’s clients.