Premiere Products turns to barcodes for increased consumer engagement through labels

Premiere Products has been a user of active packaging technology powered by marketing platform Linkz for a number of years, with labels for its products carrying invisible digital watermarks since the UK manufacturer of commercial cleaning products was introduced to their potential by Berkshire Labels.

Premiere Products supplies specialist, branded and private label janitorial cleaning products to trade channels and consumer markets worldwide. Its products are used by professionals in various environments, from catering and automotive applications to washrooms and for floorcare, and can be combined as part of a multi-stage cleaning process.

Linkz enables brands to create mobile campaigns and deliver relevant content to customers, using a range of technologies to activate packaging to turn almost any image or medium into a link between the tangible product and digital content. Activated labels, advertising and marketing collateral can be scanned by a smartphone running iOS or Android.

Nathalie Muller, Linkz CEO, explains that active packaging allows Premiere Products to use its labels to advise customers on the proper use of its products. ‘This is not a bottle of bleach you buy in the supermarket. End users receive training delivered through existing educational content, but after six months that knowledge fades. Linking the product directly to product data sheets and instructional content allows the delivery of information that otherwise wouldn’t fit onto a printed label.’

‘These are complex industrial cleaning products,’ adds Paul Roscoe, Berkshire Labels managing director, ‘and many of their customers are not native speakers. So active packaging is a good vehicle for them to share information.’

When Premiere Products first activated the packaging for its commercial cleaning products, the company was entering a brave new world of costumer engagement that would prove to benefit it in multiple ways, as the company’s commercial director Peter Brown explains.

‘Our initial work with Linkz proved to us that if you provide the right call to action on the packaging and deliver a useful result, you’ll increase customer engagement. Best of all though are the analytics that Linkz gives us, showing when and where the products are used and helping us understand our end customers better.’

‘There have been a lot of scans, and Premiere Products has direct access to that information,’ says Muller. ‘That’s useful information,’ affirms Roscoe.

Barcodes

Premiere Products has now adopted a new Linkz feature that lets it harness existing EAN (UPC) barcodes to link to digital information, with end users scanning the barcode, rather than using the watermark, to access additional product information, which can be automatically delivered in the user’s preferred language. Muller says Premiere Products was pleased with its first exposure to active packaging, and the reaction and response from its customers.

Continuing to use the Linkz platform through this new feature will bring more benefits, such as all of Premiere Products’ Premium brand packaging being automatically activated when shipped as each product already carries an EAN barcode.

‘Using the barcode is just as effective as a watermark, and saves money as you’re utilizing an existing element of the packaging. And having large labels means there is ample room for an on-pack call to action to inform users how to interact with the product’s packaging.’