Brand Matters: A Question of Character
TippingSprung LLC
It’s not every day that beauty product manufacturers can learn something from the wine industry. However, recent developments in “talking-label” technology offer package designers some interesting ways to “label” their products.
First, let’s head to the wine cellar. Italian company Modulgraf has announced the release this fall of special talking labels. Modulgraf’s core business is the design and production of wine labels. The new labels, implanted with a chip, can be interpreted via radio frequency by a small handheld reader. Intended for high-end vintages, the labels will store recorded information about the wine, vintage, and serving tips. “The idea is to bring the oenologist to the table so that each wine can explain itself in the first person,” said inventor Daniele Barontini in a Reuters article. “It could tell you how to enjoy the wine, where it came from, everything you’d hear from a sommelier.”
Transferring such technology to the beauty product and fragrance markets doesn’t seem that far of a leap. Audible labels may help these products tell their unique stories.
Modulgraf is looking to the talking label for help with another task that may also interest beauty products companies: anticounterfeiting. Such labels are seen as extremely difficult to reproduce.
More practically, recorded information might help solve the deepening problem of limited real estate on the multilingual “global” label. As products are designed for use around the world, companies are being forced, for regulatory and marketing reasons, to apply ever more languages to packaging. There simply isn’t enough room. Some firms are adopting accordion-folded labels or increasing label and package sizes at great expense. Some are reducing type to near-microscopic dimensions. Others are adopting strategies of regional labeling to allow sets of specific languages on each label. Perhaps the talking label is more friendly to many end-users, speaking to them in their local language in a way they can understand and without causing them to squint.
Robert C. Sprung can be reached at robert@tippingsprung.com. TippingSprung (New York City) offers brand strategy, naming, and design services.
The talking label is starting to progress in the medical field, spurred on by improvements in voice technologies and the availability of cheaper components.
Talking Products, a UK-based manufacturer, produces a battery-powered label that can be affixed to a box and can store up to a minute of information. The Royal National Institute of the Blind distributes it in the United Kingdom. At a price of £6.99 for each label, and with its current bulky size, this technology seems to have a long way to go before prime time.
A broader-based solution for a talking beauty label would have to be implementable on a large scale, have significant storage capacity for many languages, allow for easy duplication of data onto thin labels, and mate with an ergonomic, compact reader with high fidelity. All this at a competitive price. Satisfying these needs seems challenging but, given the rapid advances in audio technology, hardly out of the question.