Overview

Juggling packaging artwork across formats and channels can feel like a never-ending battle for CPG companies. As customers increasingly demand personalization, constantly reformatting packaging artwork drains effort, introduces errors, and delays time-to-market. Personalizing packaging with dynamic content while maintaining brand consistency can lead to costly packaging artwork mistakes, which, thankfully, automation helps overcome. 

The Growing Importance of Personalized Packaging in CPG

From limited edition products to seasonal variations, regional alternatives to free samples – personalized packaging is a common requirement for any company in the CPG industry. 

• Better brand loyalty: Personalized packaging fosters a sense of ownership and belonging with the brand. By caring about individual preferences, personalization can lead to stronger, long-term loyalty.

• Improved customer satisfaction: Customized packaging artwork creates uniqueness, fostering stronger customer connections. Brands can enhance customer satisfaction by adapting designs to seasonal trends, special events, or individual preferences. 

• Stronger competitive position: Brands' ability to bring personalized packaging to the market also positively impacts their competitive position. Custom designs help companies stand out in competitive markets, creating memorable and meaningful brand perceptions. 

Challenges in Personalization

Personalizing packaging artwork at scale presents several challenges for CPG companies, including maintaining design consistency across multiple products while catering to individual preferences. If personalization is not accurately aligned with consumer demand, it can lead to costly errors and rework, delaying the entire process. That said, let’s look at the top challenges in personalizing packaging artwork: 

• Time-to-market pressures: First to market, first to win! Companies in the CPG industry are always looking to bring products to the market – before their competitors. This pressure often causes packaging artwork reviews and approvals to be cut short, leading to incorrect or inconsistent designs.

• Dependence on manual workflows: Manual efforts to enable personalization can delay time to market while introducing errors and issues in the packaging process. From ensuring robust version control to scaling packaging artwork for different channels, teams often struggle to adapt designs for various formats, languages, and regions.

• ‍Complexity of SKUs: Personalization challenges grow multi-fold for CPG companies with multiple SKUs. Since each SKU may require unique text, colors, or branding elements, it can slow down individual approvals, reviews, and adaptations. Multiple SKUs also lead to various iterations, delaying the launch of your products.

• Evolving regulatory requirements: Different regions have different guidelines for packaging artwork, from ingredient lists to safe usage, etc. Personalizing packaging while ensuring design elements do not infringe on trademarks or copyrights is essential to avoid legal disputes. In addition, companies need to balance efficiency, compliance, and consumer appeal in their packaging. 

• Ensuring brand consistency: Maintaining brand consistency while addressing unique market or customer requirements is a significant challenge CPG companies face when personalizing packaging artwork. It isn't easy to provide stakeholders with the tools they need for innovative, centralized design that maintains the brand’s global voice while adapting content for local markets. 

How Automation Enables Personalization at Scale

Automation helps brands conquer personalization complexities across multiple SKUs and channels. Brands can carry out rapid iterations of different packaging artwork, ensure brand guidelines are followed, and ensure necessary compliance. 

That said, here are five ways automation enables personalization at scale: 

• Dynamic packaging: Automation allows for the mass personalization of packaging. Using automated tools, teams can dynamically insert product names, ingredient lists, QR codes, and images into packaging artwork during printing. They can also adjust artwork for different products, regions, or customer segments without redesigning the entire package – offering an excellent opportunity to personalize packaging artwork for limited editions, regional variations, or seasonal designs.

• Quicker design and delivery: With automation tools, CPG firms can rapidly adapt and personalize packaging for multiple channels, formats, and platforms. Teams can generate various versions of packaging artwork with personalized elements based on pre-defined templates. This minimizes manual effort, reducing the time and effort required to create different designs for different customer preferences. Automation also accelerates multichannel or multi-SKU designing, ensuring the brand messaging message resonates through every medium.

• Faster approvals: Automation tools also quicken the approval process, allowing CPG companies to bring products to the market quickly. Cloud-based automation tools support real-time collaboration between designers, project managers, and packaging engineers. This helps capture and integrate feedback faster, allowing for streamlined change management, rapid iterations, and quicker approval cycles for personalized designs.

• Reduced labor costs: Personalized packaging can be expensive, given the time, effort, and resources needed to tailor messaging and design for different audiences or regions. For instance, automated proofing and comparison tools can help packaging artwork teams identify issues in digital designs and print proofs early in packaging. This helps in their quick resolution, thereby minimizing the time and costs of reworks and revisions. 
• Streamlined versioning: Automatic version control capabilities help teams track changes and ensure everyone accesses and works on only the latest version. This speeds up artwork proofing while safeguarding assets against non-compliance. Automation can also help teams eliminate inconsistencies, compare text, fonts, and colors across different personalized artworks, and improve turnaround time.  

As personalization becomes an essential requirement in packaging artwork, automation plays a vital role in accelerating time-to-market. Companies can leverage automation to resolve common bottlenecks, ensure efficient progress from design to production, and maintain a smooth and stress-free approval process across all teams.

Learn how ManageArtworks can help you on your personalization journey.