Product packaging is an artform all to itself. The real estate is limited and precious, so text, logos, and design are carefully chosen and blended to attract and appeal to the right kind of customer. Considerable time, effort, and expense goes into creating the perfect label. So the last thing most brand managers want to do is cover it with a promotional message.
In recent years, hang down bottle neck tags have become a popular way for food and beverage manufacturers to communicate with customers. But when those neck tags hang down low enough to cover product information, it causes friction between members of the marketing team. This is the story of how PrintFlex Graphics came up with a unique and impactful solution to help a customer overcome this common problem.
The Challenge – Bottle Neck Tags Cover the Product Label
All sorts of products, from beverages like wine and soda to cooking ingredients like olive oil and vinegar, are packaged and sold in bottles or jugs. In the competitive retail space, on-pack promotions can be an effective way to get attention, communicate with shoppers, and stand out from the crowd. Traditionally, our customer would accomplish this with a bottle neck tag that can be slid over the top of the product and hang down, displaying the promotion.
Unfortunately, in this situation that wasn’t going t be an option. The bottle neck tag would hang down too far and cover up the product label. The customer needed a solution with the ease and convenience of a hang down bottle neck tag, that wouldn’t affect the visibility of the product label.
The Solution – Who Says Bottle Neck Tags Have to Hang DOWN?
Often, things that seem impossible only seem that way because our mindset limits our perspective of what can be accomplished. That’s where the PrintFlex team is at our best. Where others see impossible, we see an opportunity for creative thinking. And that’s when we start asking the “what if” questions that get us to a solution.
In this particular scenario, the question that led to our AHA moment was “What if, instead of hanging down, the bottle neck tag hung UP?” Of course, for the tag to “hang” up, we’d need to break a few laws of physics, but you get the idea. There’s valuable real estate above the package that’s going unused. We set out, through a series of tests, to create a bottle neck tag that would reliably stick up instead of hanging down. In doing so, we were able to solve the customer’s problem and deliver a solution with even more attention-grabbing power than the traditional bottle neck tag.
The Results – A New Way to Think About Promotional Labels
Once we solved for this customer’s problem, it opened up a whole new world of possibilities for helping customers display promotional messaging in a retail environment. We’ve gone on to produce a variety of pop up and pop out solutions on bottles, boxes, and bags that provide eye-catching visual appeal without compromising packaging design. We now have a solution in place to help our customers keep their package label visible, while capitalizing on wasted and valuable real estate to win the attention of shoppers.