Product Personalisation
One of the most exciting spin-off benefits of internet marketing has been the ease with which retailers can offer shoppers a personalised product. Whether it’s an engraved piece of glassware or an individually printed greetings card, customers appreciate, and will pay a premium for, a gift which has a touch of the personal about it. By keeping label printing in-house, it’s a relatively simple matter to add the customer’s name – or any other requirement – to an otherwise anonymous item, such as, say, a bottle of wine or box of handmade chocolates.
Corporate Gifts
As part of their marketing strategy, most firms have, at one time or another, used corporate “freebies” to bring their company name to the clients’ attention and hopefully keep it there. By exploiting the ability of an in-house label printer to cope economically with short production runs, it’s a straightforward proposition to offer corporate gifts with specially designed labels at a reasonable price without the need to insist on high levels of minimum purchases.
Re-badging to add value
Buying generic stock items which can be packaged attractively to add value is a simple way of increasing unit profits. Scented candles, for instance come in such a wide variety of sizes and fragrances that a photographic quality colour printer can be an invaluable tool in achieving distinctive packaging to expand your market and add value. An inspirational example of how rebranding can work can be found in a group of schoolchildren in Somerset who bought an entire stock of Fairtrade coffee at source and designed their own labels to market the re-packaged coffee beans.
Commemorative items
Re-badging products to “catch the wave” of sporting or other national events is nothing new. Chocolate bar manufacturers, for example, frequently issue “special edition” products for events such as the football world cup or Olympic Games. An in-house label printer makes it simple for your firm to do the same. Well, if it’s good enough for Mars Bars…
Packaging advertising
Many manufacturers send their products to customers, retailers or wholesalers in plain packaging with a fairly nondescript shipping label: a missed opportunity! With one of the modern generation of colour label printers, turning your packaging into an effective marketing tool is too good an opportunity to miss.
Seasonal products
The Christmas period is a time when products are seen on the shelves which don’t appear at any other time of year. Christmas decorations are an obvious example, but certain types of food are particularly associated with the festive season – or indeed other times of year such as Easter or Halloween. Again, efficient short run label production can help capture the market at the right time. Take all those seasonally marketed craft beers, for example, which appear in the run up to Christmas only to disappear from the shelves just as quickly in early January.
Whatever your product, if it needs a label, there’s a great opportunity to add value and make your goods stand out from the rest by harnessing the potential of short run, bespoke label printing.
Christine Tomlinson has had a varied career, starting as an art teacher at the local comprehensive in Yorkshire. When she married and started a family, a friend of her husband was able to offer her some home-based work designing advertising copy for an agency, which has now become her full time occupation as the children have become more independent.
Christine still enjoys “dabbling with paints” in her spare time and has built up quite a following for her hobby of photographing the pets of friends and family, which she modifies into delightful original paintings.
Mindstorms EV3
For housecleaning, particularly floor vacuuming, iRobot’s Roomba 780 appears to be the favorite for 2013. Equipped with dual HEPA that can filter dust and clean the surrounding air, controllable by infrared remote device, programmable to work even without your presence up to seven sessions, and with a longer battery power than earlier models, this robot is by far the most reliable housecleaning robot so far.
From the conceptual Tamagochi virtual pet now comes Pleo, a robotic pet dinosaur made by Ugobe in 2006 and now popularized by Innvo Labs, a division of Jetta Company. Although programmed to simulate the actions and responses of a real Camarasaurus baby dino, the robot learns to create its own responses and thus develops individuality later, much like a living pet animal. Hence it can be a lifelong companion for someone who wants to have a pet yet cannot stand molting hair, poop-cleaning, chewed-up upholstery and morning wake-up slobber.
