In This Issue

MSU researchers question OTC warning label effectiveness Medicine packages barrage consumers with information, some of which is required to be "prominent" and "conspicuous."

Package Gallery

Authentication that also engages consumers

By Pat Reynolds, Editor, Packaging World

Technology once viewed exclusively as a means of brand protection and authentication is now seen as a dynamic new way to communicate with consumers. Implementations of brand-protection solutions can be found in products as varied as shampoo, high-end balsamic vinegar, and wine.

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But if any group of packaged goods manufacturers knows what it's like to do battle with today's counterfeiters and gray marketeers, it's those who market personal care products through exclusive agreements with salons and specialty retailers.

Management at one such company, Intelligent Nutrients (IN), includes an authentication component in its packaging. This Minneapolis-based start-up markets a certified-organic line of personal care products such as pure-seed face serum that sells for $60 per 1.7-oz bottle. From the day IN's product was made available to consumers, the bottles, cartons, cases, and pallets have all carried unique identification numbers tied into the Digital Authentication, Track and Trace (DATT) system from Verify Brand LLC.

"DATT emerged from the pharmaceutical industry, where certain drugs have to be tracked every step of the way. It's an extremely effective defense against diverters and counterfeiters," says Rick Goldberg, IN Directing Manager.

For each bottle of IN certified-organic health and beauty product, Verify Brand generates a unique code that gets printed in both alphanumeric and 2D bar-code format on each bottle's label. Corrugated cases and pallets of cases also get unique codes, and in each case, the codes establish a parent/child relationship. So, the case code identifies the case as the parent of all the bottles it holds, and the pallet code identifies the pallet as the parent of all the cases it holds.

When a pallet reaches a Distribution Center, the pallet code is scanned. The Verify Brand database records this pallet code so that IN knows for certain that the pallet, its 150 corrugated shippers, and the 1,800 bottles in those shippers, have been received by Distributor A and are available for valid sale. As customer orders are picked from Distributor A, each case of bottles is scanned so that the database knows which unique bottle codes have been sent to which customers.

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A Web portal set up by Verify Brand has an investigator feature that lets IN employees check codes against the central database.

Salons that are authorized to carry IN's products can access a separate, secure Web portal.

Consumers also can access the same Web portal available to salons. When a consumer enters the unique code on a bottle, a code-check mechanism built into the Verify Brand software automatically converts that code's status from "active" to "redeemed" to prevent consumers from redeeming a code more than once.

And the cost of implementing this track-and-trace functionality? Goldberg estimates it's about 20 cents per bottle.

Read more about packaging authentication that engages consumers.

MSU researchers question OTC warning label effectiveness

Medicine packages barrage consumers with information, some of which is required to be "prominent" and "conspicuous." But marketing claims and brand names still overshadow critical fine print on nonprescription medications, Michigan State University researchers found.

In a study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, MSU researchers examined the effectiveness of two required warnings on over-the-counter (OTC) medications—specifically, their relative prominence and conspicuousness.

"To be effective, warnings about the lack of a child-resistant feature or those that alert consumers to potential tampering of the product need to be read and comprehended at the time of purchase," explains Laura Bix, an Assistant Professor in the MSU School of Packaging. Bix, the study's lead author, is a Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station (MAES) researcher.

Medicine labels carry brand identification and descriptions of contents; information on quantity, ingredients, and dosage; directions; bar codes; price; and warning statements. Federal regulations require packages lacking a child-resistant feature, for example, to conspicuously state that the product is not intended for homes with small children. The Consumer Product Safety Commission blames packages such as these for a number of child poisonings every year.

Bix and her colleagues quantified the relative prominence and conspicuousness of five label elements on packages of OTC pain-killers: the tamper-evident warning, the child-resistant warning, the brand name, the drug facts information, and statements of claims such as "extra strength." They also evaluated whether people remembered information presented on the product packaging.

Using an eye-tracking device, the researchers found that people spent the most time looking at the brand of the product, devoting significantly less time looking at the tamper-evident and child-resistant warnings. Study participants also recalled the brand of the products at a higher rate. Two-thirds of the participants recalled one or more brands that they viewed during the course of the study, but only 18% recalled warnings related to alcohol, and 8.2% recalled that the product was not to be used in households with young children. None recalled warnings about tamper-evident features.

The researchers also found that the brand and product claims were significantly more legible than the warning statements.

View Bix's study on the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science Web site.