How specialty color helps printers stand out, open doors and create higher-value opportunities
As today’s brands fight harder than ever for attention, standing out has become more than a creative goal. For printers, expanded gamut creates an opportunity to move beyond traditional CMYK by adding specialty colors such as Pink and Green to reproduce a broader range of vivid hues, skin tones and brand colors.
Combined with specialty effects, those capabilities can create more compelling applications and open the door to higher-value work. But having the technology is only part of the equation.
Mark Geeves, co-founder of Color-Logic, explains why differentiation begins with design, how the right tools can make expanded gamut and specialty color easier to adopt and why printers must show brands what is possible rather than wait for them to ask.
Moving Beyond CMYK
Everything today is about differentiation, whether you are talking about direct mail, packaging, labels or marketing collateral. The question is how you create something that stands out from the competition, whether it is sitting on a shelf or arriving in somebody’s mailbox.
That is really what gamut expansion is about. You are introducing colors people have not traditionally seen in print and creating that moment where somebody looks at a piece and says, “Wow, what is that?” Everybody is fighting for those extra few seconds of attention before something gets ignored or thrown away.
That becomes especially important when you look at younger audiences. They expect personalization and differentiation. With Fujifilm’s Pink and Green and other specialty toners on the Revoria Series presses, printers have an opportunity to move beyond traditional CMYK and create something that gets noticed.
Ultimately, we are not just talking about return on investment. We are talking about return on response. Did somebody see it? Did it grab their attention? Did they visit a website or make a call? That is what matters.
Making the Difference Visible
Absolutely, but contrast is important. Printers cannot simply buy a press, print something with Pink or Green and assume the customer is going to understand why it matters. You have to show people what they are getting today and then put it next to what is possible with the new technology.
I use the donut analogy. You can buy a glazed donut almost anywhere. If glazed donuts are all you sell, you are competing with the grocery store, the bakery, the gas station and everybody else selling the same thing. You are in a commodity business.
The specialty donut is different. That is where you have an opportunity to increase your margin and show the customer something they may not have considered before. You can still produce the standard CMYK work, but now you also have the ability to offer something premium. And if the customer comes to you for the premium work, there is a good chance they are going to come back for the standard work too.
It becomes a door opener. Saying you offer quality printing, great service and fast turnaround is not really a differentiator anymore. Customers expect those things.
Making CMYK+ Easier to Design
One of our core beliefs at ColorLogic and Touch7 is that all print starts with design. The technology can give you these incredible capabilities, but designers need a practical way to understand and use them.
That is one of the reasons we developed a system that allows printers to produce their own fluorescent swatchbooks. Using Fujifilm’s Pink, for example, we can create 195 expanded gamut colors across oranges, reds and violets as well as another 195 pastel colors. That gives the printer 390 colors it knows it can reproduce on its own press.
The important part is those colors also take the substrate into account. You can produce the swatchbook on uncoated, matte, gloss or whatever stock you are actually going to use. It accounts for the printer’s CMYK, the specialty toner and the paper, which gives designers something tangible and color accurate to work from.
That fits naturally with the process control and professional color management services Fujifilm provides. Instead of simply showing designers what might be possible, you are giving them a predictable way to design for what the press can actually produce.
From there, the challenge is making those capabilities easy to use. Touch7 has a Photoshop plug-in that allows a designer to introduce Pink or Green into an image with one mouse click. We are not taking creativity away from the designer. We are giving the designer a way to implement specialty toner into an image predictably, accurately and quickly rather than relying on trial and error.
You can accomplish some of these things manually, but it can take hours to do what the right tool can accomplish in seconds. If we give designers and prepress teams the tools to create these effects quickly without taking away their creative freedom, they are much more likely to use them.
I look at it as workflow automation for embellishment. Fujifilm has tools like ColorPath Sync and XMF PressReady to address workflow automation on the production side. We are bringing the same idea to the designer. The goal is wow factor that is economical to design, economical to produce and faster to market.
That last part is important. One of the major advantages of digital printing is faster time to market. If an application takes longer and costs more to design than it does to produce, eventually the economics stop making sense. You have to make the creative process efficient too.
Creating More Value for Brands
It is all about the brand. It does not matter whether you are talking about a major consumer products company, a winery or a small manufacturer. They want the quality and creativity of their printed materials to represent the quality of their product.
Expanded gamut and embellishment also give printers opportunities to enter markets where visual differentiation carries a lot of value. Think about fashion, candy, craft beverages or other highly creative consumer categories. Those brands are constantly looking for ways to distinguish themselves.
And it is bigger than the package. Brands think in terms of campaigns. They are looking at the packaging, direct mail, signage, displays and all the other touchpoints surrounding the product. If printers can bring these capabilities across those applications, they become part of a much larger brand conversation.
At the end of the day, everybody wants something their salesperson can hand to a customer that earns them a few more moments of attention than the competitor gets. Differentiation is the world we live in today.
Selling the Possibility
Printers have to get beyond talking only to procurement. If the conversation is centered entirely on price, turnaround and service, you are competing on things everybody else is already promising.
At ColorLogic, we work with printers, but we also go directly to brands and agencies to educate them about what is possible in print. That is an important shift for the industry. Printers need to find ways to reach the CMO, the VP of Marketing and the brand manager and show them what press technologies such as Fujifilm’s can make possible.
You have to create demand for the capability, not simply wait for somebody to ask for it. When brands and designers understand what they can do with expanded gamut and specialty toner, they begin thinking differently about print. And when the printer can make those ideas easy to design, economical to produce and fast to market, that is where the real opportunity begins.
