Look no further than the late Steve Jobs for an example of someone who understood the sensory power of print and packaging.

The ‘unboxing’ process for each new Apple product has become the stuff of legend – and many YouTube clips – and the packaging and choice of print finishes is crucial to imparting the right message about the cool, cutting-edge product within. As Jobs himself, quoted in Walter Isaacson’s recently-published biography, said: "When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product."

 Isaacson also reveals that the most important of the three founding principles of Apple’s original marketing philosophy, devised by Mike Markkula in 1977 just as the company was getting going as a serious business, was to ‘impute’ the desired qualities by presenting everything to do with the firm in a creative, professional manner.

 Touchy-feely

Impute is a fairly unusual word, and here comes another: haptics. Haptics, from the Greek word meaning ‘I fasten onto; I touch’, helps us to explain the tactile appeal to be had from a matt laminate coating, a piece of letterpress printing on a lovely cardstock, a die-cut mailer with an appealing shape or an embossed label. One of the first sensations humans develop in the womb is a sense of touch, which helps to explain why haptics is hard-wired into our brains, whether we realise it or not.

John Haslam, joint managing director at speciality paper supplier GF Smith, has his own way of explaining this phenomenon: "I always say that one eye sees, and one eye feels," he explains. "Whenever you look at something as a consumer, be it a magazine, a brochure or a swing tag, one eye is getting a feel for the texture before you’ve even touched it. Brands like Gucci, Armani and Burberry understand this very well. They know the colour and texture on a swing tag is so important."

Haslam, like Apple’s Markkula, believes people do judge a book by its cover. That’s one of the reasons the publishing industry invests so much in special finishes such as foiling, embossing and spot coating on book jackets. A treatment can ‘speak’ to a customer, whether it’s a fluorescent pink with high-build spot varnish on a chick-lit novel bound for the beach, or luxe special editions such as Penguin’s Classics that marry beautiful design with carefully-selected cover stocks and high-end printing techniques to create a covetable whole.

"What’s important is the target audience and the image you want to put across. These haptical aspects are really important for print," states Rainer Kuhn, managing director of the PrintCity Alliance, the partnership of graphic arts industry suppliers that includes Manroland, Sun Chemical and M-real.

After all, it is haptics that provides print media with an all-important point of differentiation to electronic, screen-based communications, which are overwhelmingly flat and in RGB. PrintCity has run a number of projects to highlight the positive attributes of so-called ‘value-added printing’ techniques. Collateral produced for a FIPP magazine congress included a cornucopia of special treatments. Some examples: thermochromic and scratch ‘n’ sniff panels, UV coatings, day-glo inks, foiling, soft-touch and pearlescents, and Hexachrome printing.

An accompanying survey of publishers revealed that more than 70% felt that the use of such techniques could help magazines attract and retain advertisers. Magazines such as Wired, that champion of the digital age, understand this very well –hence that magazine’s frequent use of special colours and finishes, and different paper stocks.

Ann-Marie Lawson, business development and marketing for UK and Ireland at M-real, says: "The paper and board used in packaging, text and covers, stationery and invitations – to name a few – aren’t the silent carriers of print and identity. These are screaming, all-singing, all-dancing tangible messengers to the core identity of its paying commissioner."

PrintCity has an ongoing initiative in its Value Added Packaging project, part of which involves new sample sets that will be shown at Drupa 2012. These will highlight how a combination of value-added print techniques can increase consumer attraction and aid product differentiation, while at the same time establishing and enhancing that all-important brand identity. A glance at the shelves of any supermarket makes it immediately obvious how important these factors are.

"There is absolutely a clear trend that companies and suppliers are looking to add this extra dimension to the flat print," states Kuhn.

In turn, this trend is prompting a resurgence of what GF Smith’s Haslam describes in tongue-in-cheek terms as "the dark arts" of printing. "Die-stamping, letterpress, thermography – they are all coming back," he reveals.