A review of holograms would not be complete without a word about the role they have in packaging enhancement. Manufacturers have the considerable challenge of capturing customer attention and maintaining or growing market share, so the eye-catching and creative appeal of holograms helps to meet these challenges by giving products a highly distinctive decorative edge over competitors.
Holography is limited only by the constraints of the imagination. Continuing advances in film coating and manufacturing technology have opened the door for ever more innovative new opportunities for embossed holographic materials used in packaging, while a wide variety of specialist origination techniques offer an infinite variety of colourful 3D visual effects, ranging from the bright and stunning to more subtle graphic features.
Holographic films are ideal in the packaging industry for a wide variety of flexible applications. Wide web holographic films are commonly used for printing, gift wraps, packaging, lamination and eye-catching stickers while the richness of the film adds to the overall quality and feel of the product packaging. It’s often used on DVD packaging. The combination of opaque and translucent inks with optical technology further increases the graphic opportunities available, reinforcing brand identities, capturing customer attention and bringing new life to mature or aging package design.
API Holographic Ltd’s HoloFOIL, for instance, is one of the latest generation of decorative holographic foils used for packaging where shelf appeal is an important element of the marketing mix, particularly among premium products but increasingly with commodity consumer items. Featuring more than 20 standard patterns with differing visual effects and colour variants, API own the copyright on several hundred holographic designs which offer retail packaging designers and manufacturers an almost limitless range of options from which to develop an array of eye-catching and unique designs.
Holographic foils can be used to great effect to differentiate product at the point-of-sale – something Colgate Palmolive recognised for the launch of its new ‘Total and Whitening’ range of toothpaste into an already crowded market place. Aimed at the premium end of the market, Colgate Palmolive needed its high-quality brand to stand out from the volume market.
The consumer goods’ giant decided to use holographic foil to reinforce the high quality values of the ‘Total and Whitening’ brand while simultaneously ensuring the packaging was visually attractive enough to catch the eye of consumers rapidly scanning supermarket shelves. The distinguishing visual effects holography brings were identified as a powerful tool in building a strong and powerful message and instant recognition of premium value.
API’s foil was specified to offer a bespoke, reliable and flexible design solution which could also withstand fast production speeds. The value the foil added to the overall brand packaging is difficult to pin down precisely but has certainly help contribute to the ‘Total and Whitening’ brand becoming a market leader and instantly recognizable on the shelf.
Packaging manufacturers have become extremely adept at developing laminating, printing and die cutting technology that greatly enhances the appeal of holographic effects and also makes them difficult to reproduce apart from the inherent sophistication of the hologram itself. Once a holographic pattern material has been obtained, it is relatively straightforward to laminate it to cardboard, overprint and cut to the form of a box. More difficult is the challenge of taking a registered image holographic design, printing inks over it in register with the design and then die cutting the sheets in register with the print/hologram combination.
This precisely what was achieved for a promotional hologram used by Imperial Tobacco to distinguish its Lambert & Butler brand from others. Again developed by API, and its sister company API Laminates, the hologram was created featuring a ‘starburst’ visual effect to ensure the Lambert & Butler brand stands out at the point-of-sale.
Elsewhere, Hasbro Games has used US-based Vacumet Corporation’s HoloPRISM holographic foil technology to ensure boxes of its MONOPOLY: The Disney Edition and other packaged games catch the eye of shoppers in the busy retail environment, while Vacumet’s holographic packaging concept for Trivial Pursuit 25th Anniversary Edition has previously been commended by the IHMA for its added value appeal for brand design and packaging.
Thwarting counterfeiters
The counterfeiting explosion is being driven by increased industrial globalization, extended supply chains, the growth of brands, weak regional law enforcement and lenient criminal penalties. Moreover, the impact of the internet as a conduit for counterfeit goods and the impact of high quality reprographic technology have also made it easy and affordable to copy brand packaging.
So, against this backdrop, it’s little wonder that the hologram has emerged to become the primary choice for an expanding range of anti-counterfeiting and brand protection applications. The technology’s ability to incorporate other data forms and product tracking information is becoming increasingly important, and commercially acceptable, with the added bonus of being able to link on-pack product identification with supply chain management, market enforcement and forensic support services.
Indeed, holography’s ability to push the boundaries for new packaging applications continues. This recent holography industry awards saw imaginative solutions reinforcing the important role the technology plays, particularly in tackling product anti-counterfeiting and authentication.
Holostik India Ltd’s technique for using low optical density (OD) metalizing on holographic embossing without touching the sealing side of PVC won the ‘Innovation in Holographic Production’ category and has huge potential for pharmaceutical packaging applications. It enables blister packs to be produced with the hologram on the blister side.
This advanced hologram for blister packaging can save time and money in production as it does not require changes to the set up of existing packaging machines. Metalizing also enhances the barrier property of PVC blister film while a high temperature scratch proof coating on the hologram, which can be transparent or coloured, was also praised for its technical excellence.
New imaging techniques and combinations of other overt authentication technologies with holograms are producing a new generation of optical security devices which combine ease of recognition benefits with enhanced resistance to counterfeits. This enables the identity and distribution of goods to be controlled through an expanded system solution involving security authentication features, tracking mechanisms and investigative services.
Indeed, the rise of the Internet and globalization is blurring the edges of once geographically-based markets, often impinging upon an organisation’s ability to maintain brand image by selling only in premium channels.
The result is a burgeoning grey market economy (where legitimate goods are produced in unauthorized quantities or diverted to a market in which a retailer has no right to sell them) with exclusive, aspirational, often counterfeit products turning up for sale anywhere in the world from street corner traders in the big cities to small villages in remote provinces.
The grey economy is clearly challenging today’s sophisticated, intertwined global market place, threatening revenue streams, eroding margins, damaging corporate reputations, adding extra stress to distributor and retailer relationships and generally opening up the opportunity for service and warranty fraud on a grand-scale.
Tackling the issue typically requires the marking of individual items with a unique serial number or ‘license plate’. These can then be tracked through the whole supply chain process from the production line to final point-of-sale.
Armed with the information this facility provides, companies and the anti-counterfeiting agencies that work on their behalf can examine products found in cheap flea markets on the other side of the world, on the premises of an unauthorised retailer or dealer or on a ‘fly-by-night’ website and pose the question: “How did it get here?” – an important first step in beginning to find out what happened and where the problem lies.
Track & trace benefits
Today’s advanced holograms offer beneficial ‘track & trace’ features which can help users generate unique sequential, encrypted or random serial numbers or identify and mark products overtly or covertly either via special self adhesive labels or directly onto product using a variety of print technologies.
The identity of individual items can be linked to packaging through a unique code, which in turn can be linked to case ID, pallet ID or container ID. The recording of this so-called parent child relationship between unit pack, carton and pallet is the beginning of an electronic pedigree, which allows the item to be tracked throughout the many layers of the distribution chain: from the factory and packaging through distribution to the final user.
This type of usage can also be used to capture important events in a product’s life cycle – QA rejects and product returns, for instance – creating a flexible database that offers product history and other business reporting benefits.
Of particular value to the brand owner (and a strong financial incentive to make the investment in such systems) is the fact that the information generated at this labelling stage can be linked to the company’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) system which links in a single database the data needed for a variety of business functions such as manufacturing, supply chain management, finance, projects, HR and customer relationship management.
The move towards outsourcing the production of goods might be beneficial in terms of reducing manufacturing costs but it can impact upon the control of brand security and visibility. Here, holograms can be integrated into the supply chain security process to enable companies to maintain control of their products from the sourcing of labels or proprietary components to the manufacturing and shipment of finished goods.
Holograms can be integrated with secure web interfaces to help eliminate rogue ordering of products while authorized distributors can pick, pack and ship items in carefully measured quantities to customers with the product’s movements throughout the supply chain tracked and fully documented
When brand owners or licensors make agreements to enable a third-party to produce licensed products, a security device is typically used to ensure authenticity and to help keep track of royalties. Sequentially numbered anti-counterfeit security labels are supplied to the manufacturing site in exactly the correct number corresponding to the quantity of items ordered.
Here, the role of the hologram is to act as the security device – an integral part of an all round added value information toolkit designed to support the secure ordering, shipping, tracking and control of components. The inclusion of serial number tracking enables the licensor to search the history of a particular serial number and identify to whom that item was shipped and when. Conversely, if any items are discovered in the marketplace lacking the security label, it is automatically unauthorized thus opening the door to prosecution of the vendor for illicit trading.
Moving forward, the ability of modern holograms to incorporate other data forms and product tracking information will become increasingly important. One example of this is image serialisation, which can become visible to the naked eye when generated by overprinting or using an optical numbering method. Alternatively, it can remain covert and encrypted, requiring a special reading tool or machine to decipher it.
This enables holograms to be used for an ever widening range of anti-counterfeiting and brand protection applications, linking on-pack product identification with supply chain management, market enforcement and forensic support services. In this way, the identity and distribution of goods can be controlled through a total system solution involving security authentication features, tracking mechanisms and investigative services.
Unquestionably, one of the keys to the success of holograms since being adopted for authentication purposes in the early 1980s has been the ability to adapt and constantly find new roles. We will undoubtedly see more and more interesting developments for the technology like the ability to personalise holograms, which is just beginning to take off, that will offer far reaching benefits that develop and expand further the role of track and trace.
So, with the seemingly remorseless march of technology and the resolve of governments, anti-counterfeiting agencies and companies around the world to stand firm in the face of international organized crime, as well as the casual opportunist, there’s no reason why the hologram will not continue to evolve, becoming more and more enmeshed in global supply chains and adding value in the process. CP
Glenn Wood of the International Hologram Manufacturers Association. The IHMA – www.ihma.org – is made up of over 80 of the world’s leading hologram companies. IHMA members are the leading producers and converters of holograms for banknote security, anti-counterfeiting, brand protection, packaging, graphics and other commercial applications around the world.
