What do designers focus on?

Avery Dennison China has held its annual innovation seminar in Guangzhou for the first time. The seminar discussed a variety of design ideas to expand end users’ horizons. Kevin Liu reports

On March 8, 2011, the Avery Dennison Label Innovation Seminar (South China) was held at the Four Points Sheraton hotel in Guangzhou, Dongpu province. Around 60 people attended the seminar, which mainly focused on the packaging of chemical products, foods, medicines, and household products.

Kelvin Wang, marketing director of Avery Dennison China, said; ‘Although Avery’s label and packaging material department has now achieved annual sales of RMB 20 billion worldwide, and everybody believes that self-adhesive technology has matured already, we have been pondering over what else we can do for the market, and which new elements are required by the market. These new elements may not be new materials, nor new printing technology, but ideas, particularly ideas in respect of packaging design.’

Avery brought together the design director of Landor, one of the world’s largest brand identification and strategy consulting companies, as well as design directors from LAF International, Liby Group, Blue Moon and other key end-users. ‘They will share the difficulties that they have encountered in the label packaging design process and their solutions with you.’

Changes in the Consumer Market

According to data released by the State Statistics Bureau (NBS), in 2010, China's total retail sales of consumer goods reached 15.455 trillion yuan, an increase of 18.4 percent over the previous year. With a high rate of social and economic development and improvement of people’s living standards, there have been significant changes in consumer spending habits, value orientation and behavior. The rise of raw material and labor costs, and the changes to the exchange rate have become the main issues faced by manufacturers of consumer goods.

Chen Xianying, design director of Chinese hair care specialist LAF International Group, has noticed these changes in the consumer market. He said that changes have taken place in both people’s lifestyle and consumption habits. Along with the price rises caused by inflation and rising labor costs, packaging and printing costs have also been increased significantly. All of these factors have contributed to the changes faced by the label printing industry.  ‘On our tenth anniversary, LAF has implemented a comprehensive brand upgrade, so that the consumer can directly experience that LAF has been transformed into a more stylish and professional shampoo brand through new packaging design. We aimed to enhance the sense of quality, establish a new-brand image, and improve the product value. Such tasks will be assigned to the label.’

Trend of Packaging Design

Chen Minxi, brand planning design director of Landor, suggested in her speech that the brand owner or end-user should create more effective 'brand blocking', so that the recognition of new brands within a small area on the shelves can be increased. A recent trend is to increase the printing face area while the packaging area remains unchanged.

According to Minxi, enterprises should make good use of the characteristics of the packaging materials and new printing technology to achieve the desired design effect and avoid unnecessary waste. As an example, Minxi discussed making the most cost effective use of bronzing materials on labels with a dark as well as a light background.

‘Special label materials can be used to reflect the fashion and personality of the labels,’ said Minxi. ‘Transparent, translucent, opaque, metallic, matt, light and other different visual effects can be introduced to create differentiation at the selling point.’ At the same time, Minxi said the information on the external packing should be simplified, so consumers can focus on the branding message. Unconventional, distinctive packaging with strong visual effects can better attract the consumer’s attention. Market demands will often influence design trends. In recent years, concerns about environmental protection, hygiene, multiple purposes packaging and portability have grown. Environmental labels will become increasingly popular and light weight materials should be used as much as possible to minimize the total use of materials while guaranteeing the protection, transportation, storage and marketing features of packaging, said Minxi.

Anti-counterfeiting

Anti-counterfeiting was a hot topic of discussion for guests at the seminar. There is a popular saying that in China, ‘all good products have counterfeits. Products without counterfeits are not good products.’ Although this is just a joke, it has raised a critical requirement for the printing industry - to improve anti-counterfeiting technology. Chen Xianying mentioned in his speech that labels integrating anti-counterfeiting technology and logistics information have key advantages. ‘Multi-process label printing combining gravure, embossing, screen printing, foiling, printing on both front and back sides and many other technologies can also integrate anti-counterfeiting into the label, as can digital technology. Today many processing manufacturers can print self-adhesive labels, and many enterprises can print logistics labels. But few enterprises can print labels which incorporate the integration of anti-counterfeiting and tracking technology. The combination of these technologies will be a significant breakthrough for our label printing industry’.

Link between designers and printers

China’s consumer goods companies regard the development and design of product packaging as a top priority. However, they often encounter problems caused by designers’ lack of understanding of printing equipment, materials, and printing technology during the label development process, ultimately resulting in poor label printing quality and failure to achieve the desired effect.

To help fill this gap, Avery Dennison set up its self-adhesive printing training institute for end users in Kunshan, outside Shanghai. All end-user guests present at the seminar said they had already sent their employees to attend the printing school. Sun Ping, manager of packaging R&D of the Liby Group, said his company has established a strategic partnership with Avery. This long-term cooperation agreement has included support in respect of the application of self-adhesive labels. ‘A number of employees of our company have attended the training course held by the self-adhesive printing institute of Avery, and they make great contributions to the development and technical guidance on the company‘s new label products.’

Chen Xianying, design director of LAF International Group, said he was also once a student of the Avery printing institute.

Postscript

In conclusion, delegates heard that the label forms the product’s brand identity, while the brand represents the company’s products. With products and the market becoming increasingly homogenized, and with competition intensifying day by day, end users need to keep communicating with their label printers and label material suppliers. They need to try new materials and technologies. Likewise, only when convertors and materials suppliers enhance communication with end users and designers, understand their desires and changes in the market, can they produce forward-looking labels appropriate to the market. It was agreed that Avery Dennison has provided a valuable platform for exchanging this information.

Pictured: Avery Dennison’s Label Innovation Seminar targeted the Chinese design community 

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This article was published in L&L issue 3, 2011