Colour accuracy is the bane of print, but it is also the basis on which the serious money is earned. For printers of signs and displays, matching colours from print run to print run is an important part of their value added. It's hard enough to manage colour, but ensuring that colours match to a specific brand formula is about more than adequate systems to ensure colour data accuracy.

Brand matching a tricky business because it is a fundamental part of a corporation's image. Logo colours, such as the IBM blue, over time become synonymous with a company's values. Maybe there's some connection with the adage that 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' and the idea of blue chip companies? Or maybe that's the blue blood thing? Who knows, but it is clear that brand colours represent values. Think Virgin red and easyJet orange. Which would you rather have on your wall?

But even though colour consistency across media can be managed, colour management skills aren't necessarily enough when it comes to brand colour management. For instance, achieving the Coca-Cola red requires close collaboration with the brand owner, who may not willingly share the CMYK generic build of brand and logo colours. Coca-Cola claims that colour is a feature of its trademark and that the colour is PMS 484 and 'Coke Red' which seems to be somewhere in between PMS 484 and 485.

Such ink formulations are understandably a closely guarded secret, something that ensures both brand or product recognition and that can protect a brand owner and consumer against forgeries. This isn't just Coca-Cola's policy. Pretty much any high-ticket brand owner will be fussy about whom it shares its colour data with, so sign- and display-makers who can demonstrate their ability to get brand colours right across substrates and from run to run have the edge. Mess with the hue of a logo, inadvertently or otherwise, and you could be saying goodbye to future revenues.

The only way to ensure that you care properly for a brand owner's crown jewels is to implement a colour-managed workflow and to make sure your ink supplier can guarantee consistency and uniformity across ink batches, and that you test inks and substrates and create accurate profiles. This is no more than common sense but companies without it should not be surprised if the big-name brands won't take the risk of doing business with them.