Refresh Your Sprite campaign uses HP Indigo technology to connect with customers

Branding made personal

When Coca-Cola Israel planned a campaign to refresh its Sprite brand, the company decided to consult its customers.

“Our idea was to involve consumers in the brand campaign in a wholly new way,” says Merav Dvori, category marketing manager at Coca-Cola Israel. “For the first time, customers could design their own product label.”

The campaign invited consumers to visit the Refresh Your Sprite website and work with different elements to create a can design complete with branding, barcodes and other required information. The campaign attracted submissions from consumers from age 10 to 60 and resulted in more than 100,000 individual can designs.

Meeting the challenge of innovation

Involving customers was just the start of the Refresh Your Sprite campaign. The Coca-Cola team also wanted to print the top designs, but the tight turnaround time and small quantities made conventional can printing unsuitable. The team turned to HP digital printing for the solution.

Using the HP Indigo press ws4500, Tadbik Labels Co., of Carmiel, Israel, part of the Tadbik Group, printed the designs on shrink sleeves rather than directly onto the can. This enabled a seamless workflow from the online designs to the final prints.

According to Boris Demb, production planning manager at Coca-Cola Israel:

“Tadbik and its HP Indigo digital press
met the quality that we required as well as the
extremely tight production deadlines.”

Short run solution

Another challenge the HP Indigo ws4500 helped the Coca-Cola team surmount was the short print runs the campaign required. Each week during the four-week campaign, the public was encouraged to visit the campaign’s website and vote for the top 100 designs.

Tadbik then printed the winning designs using the HP Indigo ws4500. A case of 24 personalized cans was delivered to each winning designer and a second case of 24 was displayed at a commercial center in Tel Aviv.

While printing only 48 cans of each winning design would have been unfeasible with conventional can printing, the HP Indigo ws4500 handled the high-quality short runs with ease. “While 48 cans doesn’t sound like a lot, the total size of the job was nearly 20,000 shrink sleeves,” says Oded Shany, managing director of Tadbik Labels Co.

At the end of the campaign, a professional panel of industry-leading judges chose six finalists. More than 1 million cans of these winning designs were then distributed to retail outlets around Israel.

Winning results

Customers weren’t the only ones who had a chance to win with the campaign. Tadbik entered its work on the campaign in the 2008 HP Indigo Digital Labels and Packaging Contest and won first prize in the shrink-sleeve category. Shany explains:

“This campaign played to
our strengths as well as the strengths
of the HP Indigo press ws4500.”

“The campaign was one of those jobs that is especially rewarding since the results enjoyed such a high profile,” he adds.

For Coca-Cola Israel, the outcome was beyond expectations. “We were delighted with the results of the campaign in every way,” says Dvori. “We had a target number of surfers to the website of 2.5 million and attracted about 3.5 million, which is half of the population of Israel. We achieved fresh new looks which certainly add power to the brand.”
Source: HP