Spotlight: Technology

Japan's Lotte chewing gum brand followed Wrigley's lead and used Payne's variable data tear tape for their Lotte Lottery.

Wrigley Promotion Shows off Payne's Efficient Tear Tape

Brand owners are always looking for new ways to engage consumers at point of consumption with special promotions. Problem is, those promotions are often cumbersome to implement and time-consuming to produce and manage. The Payne packaging company recently introduced a new way to engage consumers cost-effectively with an easy-opening solution that also helps brand owners capture valuable data about customers.

Payne is a worldwide company specializing in tear tape applications that also has strong brand protection and document authentication divisions. Payne's range of tear tapes includes the Supastrip®, Vaktape™, and Rippatape™ brands used on flexible packaging, hermetically sealed packages, and paper and board products, respectively. Recently, they combined their tear tape expertise and authentication technologies for a new product called "variable data tear tape," which the Wrigley Company used for its Closer to Music promotion in the U.K.

Prize codes aplenty

Payne printed over 300 million unique and randomly dispersed alpha-numeric codes on the tear tapes that Wrigley's Extra customers use when opening the gum packages. To find out if they had won one of 100,000 available prizes, customers entered the code on a Wrigley website. During their visit to the site, they also answered a few questions about themselves, enabling Wrigley to capture valuable data about their market.

The variable data tape provided an ideal delivery system for the prize codes because the "reveal" occurred as the package was being opened, preventing consumers from having to tear open the entire wrapper or remove the product in order to find the code. This meant increased consumer convenience, retained brand identification, and a package that remained virtually intact.

Promotional messages can be printed on the outside of the variable data tear tape as well, attracting consumers at point-of-sale and alleviating the need for manufacturers to change their packaging artwork for each campaign. These printing capabilities make short-run regional or seasonal promotions easier to accomplish.

Hugh Ross, President of Payne North America in Richmond, VA, believes that these benefits will lead to the increased use of variable data tear tape as a promotional medium. "Communicating with consumers at the point-of-use is a powerful tool for brand owners and offers a great opportunity to interact with them and capture some important market information," says Ross. Following the success of the Wrigley campaign, Japan's leading chewing gum manufacturer, Lotte, launched a similar promotion called Lotte Lottery with Payne's variable data tape.

The tech behind the tape

The production of variable data tear tape is an exacting process that requires advanced database technology coupled with state-of-the-art design and printing capabilities. Payne's recent multimillion dollar investment has made this tape technology possible and added a new laboratory, a new compliance test area, and an enhanced prepress department.

Payne's variable data tear tape can incorporate high-caliber designs within a wide range of colors and sizes designed specifically to complement the overall package design or maximize impact at point-of-sale. The customized data solutions depend on the type of promotion and the number of packages and prizes that a manufacturer wishes to offer. An unlimited number of data codes up to 16 characters in length can be sequentially or randomly placed on the tear tape, and companies can add their own symbols or graphic images as well.