Colour management is a vital yet easily overlooked aspect of packaging design and print. Consistent and accurate colour usage across various substrates and print processes is essential for maintaining brand integrity, customer trust and competitiveness.

In the following blog, we aim to:

• Familiarise you with the colour management processes, ensuring you know exactly what is entailed
• Highlight inconsistencies and delays associated with ineffective colour management
• Tell you how to avoid print surprises by utilising efficient services and processes

What are Colour Management Processes?

Put simply, colour management is the way that colour profiles, standardised colour systems and calibrations are used to maintain colour fidelity in digital and printed products.

Varying digital devices read and represent colours differently. Which is why it’s advised to seek advise from colour management professionals to ensure consistency across print runs.

Using standardised colour models – like Pantone, RGB, and CYMK – help define and communicate colours to different devices. While implementing colour management processes onto your files ensures that your brand colours are not only recognisable, but consistent.

Colour management is particularly important for brands who have a wide range of packaging types produced across multiple printing processes to ensure they’re delivered to a high-quality with no inconsistencies or brand inaccuracies.

What Happens if You Don’t Implement a Colour Management Processes?

There are a number of hidden costs that come from neglecting colour management. This includes:

• Lost time
• Financial implications
• Brand inconsistencies
• Reduction in brand perception

It is well known that colour plays a significant role in brand perceptions, buyer behaviours, and customer psychology. Hence the need to maintain appropriate, high-quality, and on brand colour usage.

Well-established brands often have very recognisable branding, colours and design elements. Therefore, it’s important that these brand assets are upheld across printing and production. If your packaging doesn’t meet the expectations of your customers, there’s a strong possibility of brand damage as a result of confusion and differing perceptions. Customers may start to question authenticity, and brand loyalty can dissipate.

Inconsistent colour can result in print runs having to be re-produced. These bottlenecks increase costs, waste time and impact on your sustainability due to rejected materials and increased waste. By having an efficient colour management process, you can avoid these time and monetary costs and ensure you meet launch dates, maintain brand integrity and pursue continued sustainability efforts.

Why is This Especially Important in Packaging?

Competition is fierce. In today’s consumer-driven society, you must be competitive online and on supermarket shelves, so your packaging has the power to represent your brand as the product of choice. High-quality packaging reflects attention to detail and enhances perceived value, so nailing your colour management is crucial. (Color Confidence, 2024)

Colours that align with your consumers can influence buying decisions, and inconsistencies in your colour will make your product appear as poor quality and undesirable.

On e-commerce platforms, buyers rely on digital images. Therefore, accurate colour representation in your digital assets is also important to signify a level of trust and authenticity.

A combination of consumer-driven shopping experiences, saturated markets and inefficient colour management…well, it’s not exactly a recipe for success. It’s vital that your packaging not only stands out, but is consistent across online platforms and retail spaces, reflecting your brand integrity.

How to Avoid Print Surprises with Springfield Solution’s Colour Management Expertise

At Springfield Solutions, we have over 50 years of experience with packaging assets. By partnering with our team, avoiding colour inconsistencies and the associated delays associated is simple.

We have extensive knowledge of colour systems across all print processes and digital platforms. Working with your printers to ensure that what you see on screen and what your customers see in-store is consistent. Our teams are considerate of pre-production processes including artworking and reprographics to ensure all of the necessary elements of success from the beginning.

Colour management is essential to maintain a consistent look and feel across your products, and our services support you in building brand trust and maintaining brand identity, even when introducing new products to print. Our teams align with your brand, preventing inaccuracies in colour and design from the very start.

For peace of mind when it comes to colour, get in touch with our team and present your brand accurately through your packaging.