It’s International Print Day 2022!
Today is all about celebrating the print industry and the skilled workers who keep the presses running every day. This special day of appreciation is vital as many people outside this incredible industry might not realise just how important it is.
To drive this point home, we tried to imagine a world where print never existed – just what would that look like?
It’s easy to take many of the incredible things the print industry gives us for granted. Think about the exciting feeling you get when you spot the iconic colours of your favourite brand on the shelf. Think about the sense of luxury you get when you run your fingers over a spot-gloss or soft-touch varnish. Think about the funny, witty print ads you’ve seen that build a real connection between you and the brand you love.
In a world without print, all of that is gone. You wouldn’t be able to bring your brand to life.
Expressing your identity
Print is still, and has always been, the best medium for a brand to express its identity. This is important because, if you don’t have a clear identity, why should any consumer trust you with their time and money? It’s an issue that’s more acute now than it ever has been in the grip of the cost-of-living crisis when consumers are forced to become more discerning about what they spend their money on.
A brand’s label and packaging are central to the sense of identity that a brand expresses through its products. Want to create a sense of luxury around a premium product? Use foiling, soft-touch varnish, and glossy lettering. If you’re an upstart brand, you might want to focus more on vivid colours and a unique die-cut label shape.
Brands are predominantly a visual concept, whether they rely on an iconic logo, a memorable mascot, or even a particular colour. Replicating these visual elements consistently through print is absolutely key to building that relationship with your customers. However, contemorary printing techniques like the use of innovative tactile varnishes or fragranced inks give brands extra ways to communicate messages to their customers.
As consumers continue to rediscover the joy of touch, how a pack feels in the hand can be vital in swaying a consumer’s purchasing decision. Take the rough with the smooth – literally – to give a label depth and use different textures to draw attention to key messages.
Scented inks also provide another way for brands to creatively engage with their customers. Our sense of smell is strongly linked to our emotions – we’ve all had the experience of a familiar scent triggering happy memories from years gone by.
Forward thinking brands can include fragranced inks in scratch ‘n’ sniff packaging, which can be an effective strategy on two fronts. One is that it acts as a ‘try before you buy’ feature for products like coffee and air fresheners, where their appeal is closely tied to their aroma. The second is that it sends your customers a subconscious message that they can’t ignore. Think of how many visual messages a consumer is bombarded with every day. Marketing experts estimate consumers are exposed to up to 10,000 ads every day – but clever use of fragrances can let your brand bypass all of that visual noise in an instant!
Print unlocks near-limitless opportunities to be creative and wow your customers, none of which would be possible without it.
Changing the world
If you were enjoying reading about the many possibilities of print, we have some bad news. The truth is that all of the above doesn’t really matter, because the world would be so fundamentally altered without print that effective branding would be the least of our worries. Art, politics, technology, and even geography would be radically different.
The influential writer Alan Moore once said of writing; “You’ve got 26 characters, and a peppering of punctuation. With that, you can describe the entire conceivable universe.” This is true, but how would that knowledge spread without print?
While rudimental woodblock printing is believed to be about 2000 years old, the invention of the printing press in the 15th century turbocharged the spread of knowledge and ideas. Previously, books were written entirely by hand. As literacy rates were so low in Europe, they were only written by the very wealthy or the Church and were often copied out into Latin. The spread of knowledge was tightly controlled, and it was only with the advent of print that people were able to share it, in the language that they spoke.
Without print, it’s highly likely there would be no industrial revolution and no internet. Your favourite film would never be filmed, your favourite song would never be written, and brands as we know them simply wouldn’t exist. The hundreds of thousands of employees in the global print industry would all need to find something else to do, as it’s likely there would be no global industries whatsoever.
Not only has printing changed what’s possible for your brand, but it’s also changed the history of the planet forever. That’s why we celebrate this incredible industry today, and every other day – there’s nothing else quite like it!
To learn more about how we can use the power of print to enhance your brand, get in touch today!
