HP Indigo and Hershey bring women’s stories to life

‘One Chocolate Bar at a Time‘ – a new film to values female talent

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HP Indigo
HP Indigo and The Hershey bring women’s stories to life, One Chocolate Bar at a Time. Photo HP Indigo

Hershey’s has been leveraging the power of digital printing technology to transform its iconic chocolate bar packaging into a celebration of women. Now in its third year, the Hershey’s milk chocolate bar packaging being used to promote and honor female talent across the world.

First launching the campaign in 2020, Hershey collaborated with HP Indigo and used a highly productive, cost-effective HP Indigo 20000 digital press, by Brazilian print service provider Camargo Cia de Embalagens, to develop 320,000 limited edition ‘HerShe’ chocolate bars. The campaign, which featured artwork to celebrate the talent of female musicians, illustrators, photographers and poets throughout Brazil, saw huge success. In Brazil, the parallel social media campaign reached close to 2 billion impressions.

Fast forward to 2022, the campaign is being run in collaboration with HP Indigo digitally printed packaging for the third time and will help make ‘invisible women, visible by supporting gender equality through a global movement that celebrates female achievements in science, business, sports, activism, and music. This year, the Hershey’s milk chocolate bars will feature a QR code, also printed with an HP Indigo 20000 digital press, that will open consumers’ eyes to the many contributions of women, beyond each bar. In addition, HP will be unveiling a film with Hershey, amplifying how HP Indigo’s digitally printed packaging can be used, not only to keep food safe and airtight but also to elevate brand engagement through the co-creation of user-generated content, to become the ultimate vehicle for cultural relevance and on-pack storytelling.

Matching Hershey’s ambitions with the right HP Indigo solution

The HP Indigo 20000 digital press was the ideal printing solution for this campaign, designed with diverse labels and packaging applications in mind. “Empowering women, and advancing diversity, equity and inclusion is a business priority for us. We invite new perspectives, ideas, and experiences in everything we do to reflect the diversity of consumers around the world. Throughout the campaign, HP has helped us to open our eyes to the power of digitally printed packaging, allowing us to engage with our audience in a creative and unique way while celebrating women and their achievements globally,” said Santhi Ramesh, chief marketing officer International, The Hershey.

The HP Indigo 20000 digital press 29-inch image width can capture the majority of packaging applications, including flexible packaging, shrink-sleeve, wrap-around labels, and in-mould labelling, and contains the only digital colour printing process that matches gravure printing, delivering high-resolution printing and perfect registration. This enabled Hershey to meet its strict brand colour needs using 7 ink stations, whilst also bringing the female voices and stories to life.

Commenting on the campaign, Jose Gorbea, Global head of Brands, Agencies & Sustainability, HP Indigo, said, “I’ve loved seeing how the #HerShe campaign has evolved over the past 3 years and I’m excited to see what other personalized storytelling opportunities HP’s digital print technology can achieve in order to make tangible connections and further engagements with consumers.”

Recent research carried out by WARC on the marketing effectiveness of digitally printed packaging, in which more than 9,000 marketing campaigns were analyzed and benchmarked, highlighted that brands have the potential to double their sales and marketing return on interest when they utilize personalization and most importantly, user-generated content in their packaging. “This can be achieved through digital print, and it is why now 70% of digitally printed packaging campaigns, like Hershey’s, are being used strategically as the lead communication touchpoint of the marketing mix to build brand equity”, added Gorbea.

2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India

Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.

The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry. While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.

The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.

Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.

Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.

Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.

– Naresh Khanna

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