New label ideas can come from customers

Your company will live and die on its ability to convey a coherent brand identity. Your packaging is a huge part of this effort, as it’s presumably the final way consumers will encounter your logo, color scheme and other distinctive visual elements before making a purchase. As one year passes into another, it’s a great time to ponder refreshing your labels to ensure they’re having a maximum impact. The next obvious question is where your next visual identity will come from. Potentially, you could get great ideas from your customers.

The power of crowdsourcing
As Packaging World recently pointed out, some companies are already asking their audiences for visual design ideas. You’ll have to take care with such systems to make it clear how winners will be compensated and the legal ownership of any visual elements you use. With that squared away, however, you’re free to use your brand’s reach to find new ideas. While you search for labeling ideas, you could also learn valuable information about your customers’ likes and dislikes, while gaining many new opportunities to interact with them and strengthen the impression you make.

Leading brands trust their customers
According to Forbes contributor Steve Olenski, many leading companies are taking crowdsourcing seriously as an outreach tactic. Justin Kelly, senior brand manager at Mike’s Hard Lemonade, told the author that his company has successfully put customer-created art onto cans as part of a contest. He explained that when consumers find ways to contribute directly to a company’s imagery, they have a stronger connection to the company. In an era of marketing when loyalty can feel like a lost art, this sense of personal ownership is invaluable.

Great printers make creativity come alive
When you reach out to consumers as part of a contest, you can potentially select several winners from among the visual idea submissions you solicit and print each of them on a limited number of labels. The multiple different looks for your products can express the variety of opinions and creativity prevalent among your customer base. Of course, this is the kind of system that requires you to have an adequate label printing system in place. If you only employ mass-produced labels, such a creative strategy may be logistically unfeasible.

When you have a powerful in-house printer such as the Primera LX900 Color Label Printer at your command, your packaging strategy can evolve, with high-quality visual design at every step of the way. Find out about this printer in our U.S. store here, or our Canadian store here.