How CPG brands can get packaging right—without compromise

For CPG companies, time is of the essence. Their success depends on their ability to bring products to market on time. As they aim to shorten the gap from farm to table, they face several hurdles in getting their packaging artworks right. Managing all the content that goes into their artwork and complying with evolving regulations while meeting customer expectations is never easy. Read on to uncover how to balance efficiency, compliance, and consumer appeal in CPG packaging.

Packaging Artwork Challenges in the CPG Industry

Packaging artwork is critical for brand communication. CPG companies must have the right processes to get the design across all their SKUs. When done right, it can ensure consistency between design, sales, marketing, and production departments. If not managed properly, it can be costly.

Companies face several challenges that can impact the overall success of their products and brand identity, including:

• Design Consistency and Brand Identity: Sustaining design consistency and brand identity across various products with unique design specifications.
• Review and Approval: Reviewing and approving packaging artwork with internal stakeholders, external vendors, and regulatory agencies.
• Compliance: Ensuring compliance with evolving and constantly changing labeling and requirements without compromising quality or consumer appeal.
• Time-to-Market: Getting packaging right the first time to quickly bring products to market and maintain a competitive edge.
• Packaging Variations: Adapting to packaging variations of existing products across sizes, flavors, seasonal and promotional offers, etc.
• Audit Trails: Maintaining comprehensive audit trails to track pack copy changes and artwork reviews, ensuring transparency and accountability.
• Quality Checks: Conducting regular quality checks to unearth labeling errors in digital designs and print proofs early in the packaging lifecycle. 

Packaging Artwork Best Practices to adopt

Packaging artwork errors can be costly. Therefore, overcoming common packaging challenges is crucial for customer satisfaction, compliance, and the overall brand reputation of CPG businesses. Since any delay in packaging directly translates to a delay in revenue realization, companies must strike the right balance between navigating the maze of regulations, getting products launches on time, and minimizing recalls. Here are some best practices to adopt:

Minimize Manual Effort

Eliminate manual effort in curating pack copy and doing manual proof-reading of artworks. Automating this process can streamline the examination of every aspect of packaging, including text and design elements, colors, fonts, barcodes, spelling and more. This increases the likelihood of getting it right the first time and accelerating time-to-market.

Centralize Artwork Copy

Centralizing all packaging artwork copy in one place increases brand consistency, reduces errors, and eliminates rework. Pack Copy changes from product to product and using Excel files to manage them is cumbersome and error prone. A centralize copy system encourages content reuse, content approval and making sure the copy is complete.

Use Adobe Plugins

Designing attractive and error-free packaging artwork is challenging. Add to this the practice of cutting-and-pasting content from Excel, Word and other documents, increases the risk of content errors. Designers must leverage Adobe Plugins, which pull content directly from a centralized system, to avoid copy-paste errors. These tools can also optimize the development process by quickly and efficiently reformatting content in the right font and style.

Use Workflow Templates

Workflow templates allow stakeholders across packaging, marketing, quality, regulatory, and external agencies and printers to choose and initiate artwork projects for multiple purposes. They can customize templates to fit their business needs, allowing for better flexibility and adaptability to emerging trends and regulations.

Invest in a Digital Asset Management Tool

Adopting a digital asset management tool allows CPG companies to efficiently store and manage all artworks and associated files. Packaging team scan search for the latest approved version of the files and eliminate errors due to incorrect file versions.

Striking the Right Balance with ManageArtworks

Customer demands, market trends, and industry standards often define how products are developed, shipped, and delivered. Non-compliance with necessary regulations can result in hefty fines, causing business disruption and customer dissatisfaction.

To improve the quality and efficiency of your packaging artworks while meeting market, customer, and regulatory requirements on time, it's essential to streamline and automate the entire packaging artwork management process. By adopting an artwork management platform like ManageArtworks, you can reduce packaging errors, launch products faster, and ensure compliance.

Explore our cloud-based packaging and artwork lifecycle management system to introduce efficiency in every step of your artwork's journey, reduce reworks and approval times, and significantly accelerate time-to-market.

To know more, click here to book a FREE DEMO.