To highlight North Print & Pack 2013, a series of short interviews with speakers who will be presenting at the event has been developed.  The latest interview is with Gregory Bentley, Packaging Innovator, Coca-Cola Europe...

You have just launched a very innovative personalised campaign by printing popular names on your Coca-Cola bottles. Can you give us some background on the idea behind it?

The Coca-Cola campaign to print popular names on our bottles was actually launched in Australia at the end of 2011, and proved to be extremely successful. We knew that if we were going to run a similar campaign in Europe, there were a number of additional obstacles like language and cultural differences between the various countries to overcome, not to mention the much higher volume of labels and different technical solutions in Europe!

However, our very efficient team, including suppliers, has worked hard over the course of the year to ensure we complete this project, which seemed anear impossible task a year ago.

How do you see the importance of personalised packaging growing?

Personalisation on packaging is definitely a big trend at the moment, whether it’s customer or consumer personalisation. Marketers need to be clever with this in order to maximise their return on investment on marketing campaigns.

There is obviously a considerable cost involved to deliver a personalised campaign, so although I see more marketers using personalisation as a marketing tool, I cannot at this moment see this becoming a norm in the future. Personalised products will run alongside generic products, but as a separate supply chain.

I would like to add that it is important to remember that the execution of these campaigns are critical, as consumers can easily be disappointed with the end-product if it does not meet their expectations.

What new print technology are you most excited about?

There is a lot of speculation in the industry about whether digital will replace analogue printing, although I cannot see this happening in the near future.

The arrival of nanography is certainly a very exciting prospect, and I am looking forward to see if the machines will deliver on the speeds that have been promised initially. If it does, it will definitely open a range of new cost effective marketing channels for marketers to explore.

The idea of a smaller press that can print to the same quality and speed of the HP Indigo press is also a welcome one. It would be ideal to have such a printer that can be transported as need for location activation.

Gregory Bentley will be presenting the story behind getting Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ bottles onto the shelves at North Print & Pack 2013. His session, ‘How Developments in Print Technology can enrich the Brand Experience’, will take place at 11:15am on Thursday 16th May 2013 in the Packaging Theatre.

[Image shows Coca-Cola's Gregory Bentley alongside Northprint & pack logo]