Recognizing the Importance of Color in Packaging Sets Your Brand up for Success

Apple’s distinctive boxes serve as a prime example of the importance of color in packaging. Image Source: Flickr user Brett Jordan

One of the most widespread concepts in business is the seven-second rule — people make vital decisions within the first seven seconds of encountering a product, and what happens in that time can either nurture long-term consumer loyalty or turn would-be customers off for good.

However, most consumers’ first contact isn’t with the product, but with its packaging. This element is vital to differentiating your brand and its offerings.

For example, many more people would likely recognize the signature blue of a Tiffany & Co. box than the jewelry it may contain. As such, packaging design is often just as important as the product design, shaping consumer perception from the first touch point. With more products than ever competing for space in the marketplace, smart packaging design choices can be the deciding factor in product success, and spectrophotometric analysis helps ensure that your vision becomes reality.

Harnessing the Power of Color in Packaging

Packaging color choice isn’t arbitrary, and it goes beyond simply selecting an aesthetically pleasing color. Instead, designers must draw on both deeply ingrained color psychology and a preexisting visual lexicon of product associations to create packaging that speaks to the consumer in a language they understand.

Brands use colors to project a specific message. For instance, soft drink brands typically use blue for low-sugar options, green for lemon-lime flavors, and red for cola. Similarly, consumers associate green with pine scent in household cleaners and yellow with citrusy aromas in dishwashing detergent. Packaging also shapes consumer choices in prescription drugs, where it can influence perceptions of quality and performance.

Yet, it's essential to remember how these conceptions can shift over time. The sleek, minimalist, white packaging of Apple products is one that brands often shunned before because it was associated with store-brand or “generic” offerings. It's therefore possible to redefine these perceptions while simultaneously becoming defined by specific color choices.

Coca-Cola’s consistent use of color has solidified its brand identity and propelled its distinctive red to iconic status. Image Source: Flickr user Mike Mozart

The Value of Consistent Coloration

Using color as part of a product’s iconography and truly solidifying brand identity depends not just on selecting the right color, but consistently producing that color over time and reinforcing its brand association. Consider a global brand like Coca-Cola. Consumers would overwhelmingly recognize the red with the white swirl, even without seeing the Coca-Cola name.

The soft drink's hallmark red and Tiffany's blue didn't become iconic through a single consumer encounter with these colors, but by repeated exposure to the exact same color again and again. Each interaction strengthened consumer associations between the brand and the color until the two became interchangeable. Creating that consistency depends on spectrophotometric color analysis.

Ensuring Consistency Via Spectrophotometric Analysis

Spectrophotometers/colorimeters are uniquely engineered to capture crucial color information and distill it into objective data. These quantifications alert you to even the slightest color variation, ensuring that each packaging component stays within your chosen color parameters regardless of manufacturing location. In doing so, these sophisticated instruments allow you to implement global color quality control protocols to guarantee consistent, accurate coloration.

Modern spectrophotometers are incredibly versatile, allowing for the measurement of all sample types, including inks, papers, plastics, and plastic films. These instruments can measure total appearance and account for physical attributes such as gloss, giving you high levels of insight into and control of your packaging. The sophistication of today’s spectrophotometers allows you to analyze even cutting-edge packaging materials such as metallic substrates.

Agera L2: Next-Gen Color Confidence for Packaging Color Consistency

HunterLab's Agera L2 spectrophotometer delivers the precise color measurement technology packaging manufacturers need to create and maintain iconic brand identities in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Color Precision for Brand Integrity

Your consumers are viewing your packages in different settings than exist in your manufacturing facility. The Agera L2 is engineered with reference-grade 0°/45° circumferential geometry that replicates human color perception.

This spectrophotometer/colorimeter also offers a specialized Dark Performance Mode, empowering 6x the measurement precision on samples with less than 20% reflectance — perfect for packaging elements from the deepest blacks and purples to the darkest grays, browns, and blues.

Plus, Agera L2 features certified Grade ‘A’ CIE D65 source illumination, which is ideal for establishing a standard, controlled baseline for color evaluation. D65 Source Mode captures appearance under D65 daylight conditions, so results are closer to how the human eye judges color in daylight. This design simplifies color measurement in packaging that contains optical brighteners, fluorescent inks, or special finishes, since daylight naturally contains UV energy.

Total Appearance Measurement for Premium Packaging

Variations in surface texture, substrate patterns, and gloss levels affect consumers' perceived color. Even with the same red ink formulation, a high-gloss surface may appear darker than a heavily textured surface. In these cases, 0°/45° geometry is especially important because it is designed to better represent total appearance.

This spectrophotometer/colorimeter includes advanced features that allow manufacturers to quantify total appearance by accounting for the influences of a sample's physical properties. The device boasts 4x to 16x the surface-area measurement of competing models, simplifying sample averaging for high color confidence. Our next-gen Agera L2 also features simultaneous 60° gloss capture in a single measurement.

Production Efficiency for High-Throughput Manufacturing

Packaging is a high-volume application where maximum efficiency is paramount.

HunterLab's Agera L2 is built to deliver day-one improvements. This spectrophotometer integrates easily into existing workflows facilitywide, from raw materials in receiving to end-of-production inspections. The device's simple-to-learn interface and one-touch operation help reduce training curves, while a built-in camera with sample preview encourages accurate, consistent presentation to minimize discrepancies. Readouts take less than 3 seconds, keeping throughput high and supporting fast color-quality decisions.

Onboard Easymatch Essentials L2 software and connectivity further increase efficiency. Our user-friendly platform enables self-contained color workstation functionality, so operators can analyze data directly on-screen without additional PC hookup. Convenient HDMI ports support a monitor connection, while USB ports let you add a keyboard, mouse, or external drive for data export. We've also included Ethernet ports designed to simplify data sharing directly with SPCs and LIMS.

Support for Global Brand Color Consistency

Global brands need effective ways to uphold color consistency and regulatory safety in packaging, no matter where it's produced. Agera L2 makes it easier to achieve with features that increase lifetime value:

• Data security: Protect data integrity and create audit-ready documentation with user-based access controls.
• Built-in color library: Quickly compare your readouts against industry-standard scores, scales, and indices such as Y brightness and Whiteness Index for paper-based packaging.
• 32GB of storage: Easily store and access up to 4 million historical results with images to analyze historical trends and document that results meet established tolerances.

Durable construction: The Agera L2 features sealed optics and rugged housing designed for reliable, long-term performance in demanding production environments.

HunterLab Quality

HunterLab has been at the forefront of spectrophotometric technology for over 70 years. Today, our comprehensive lineup of portable, benchtop, and in-line instruments plays a critical role in the development and manufacturing of packaging materials, giving you the ultimate in color quality control. With the help of HunterLab’s cutting-edge spectrophotometers, you can truly harness the potential of color to optimize your chances of success, whether you’re updating the look of existing items or introducing new products to the marketplace.

Contact us to learn more about our innovative technologies and world-class customer support services, and let us help you select the ideal spectrophotometer/colorimeter for your needs.