ColorDrive Print Quality Management Platform

Schawk, Inc., a leading provider of brand development and deployment services, enabling companies of all sizes to connect their brands with consumers, announced that it has launched ColorDrive, the industry’s first cloud-based, print-quality management platform.

ColorDrive is the first product of its kind to align measured and calibrated visual scores throughout the packaging development supply chain process to achieve the highest levels of consistency currently possible in the reproduction of a brand’s colors worldwide. This allows marketers to objectively measure the success of meeting a brand’s color standards accurately and consistently on packaging by formalizing, simplifying and integrating quantitative and qualitative color measures. This is in contrast to today’s methods which are either too subjective or too complex to deliver accurate measurements of color consistently, leaving brands open to dilution of one of their key visual equities—color.

ColorDrive creates the conditions required to deliver brand accurate color consistently by creating a universal print-quality management platform that allows brand owners, premedia partners and printers to communicate about color using the same technical language to convert visual assessments into numbers. By calibrating subjective evaluations in this manner, ColorDrive enables these specialists to synchronize color performance goals. This empowers all participants in two ways: to deliver brand-accurate colors consistently and to improve their own internal processes incrementally with greater confidence.

The ability to achieve color consistency in consumer packaging across SKUs, substrates, channels and countries can have considerable impact on a brand owner’s top line. According to a 2007 University of Loyola Maryland Study, color plays a significant role in the consumer’s ability to recognize brands. This study revealed that color increases brand recognition by up to 80% and found that a color associated with a brand reproduced inconsistently on packaging can adversely impact the consumer’s decision to purchase a product. Inconsistent color can also create a perception among consumers that a product has been on shelf too long, or in some parts of the world, that the product is not authentic. The long-term effect is that it can dampen consumer trust in the brand.

Additional research conducted by the Secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo documented the following relationships between color and marketing: When asked to approximate the importance of color when buying products, 84.7% of survey respondents stated that color accounts for more than half of the factors considered important for choosing products. This research also revealed that people make a subconscious judgment about a product within 90 seconds of viewing it, and that 60% to 90% of their assessment is based on color alone. Consistent color may also play an important role in authenticating brands and reaffirming consumer trust, especially in developing countries where brand counterfeiting is an issue.

According to Robb Frimming, print services director at Schawk, “ColorDrive has been road tested by three of the world’s largest consumer goods companies and has undergone significant development and refinement over the past ten years. We are excited to be able to release it to the market and are confident that it will deliver exceptional value to consumer products companies and printers operating multiple plants. ColorDrive is the only commercially available print quality management platform that is brand-centric and synchronizes color communication between marketer, premedia group and printer.”