A Cause for Celebration

“Simply put, the Smirnoff brand stands for inclusivity,” says Jamie Young, Smirnoff brand manager, Diageo, about its limited-edition Love Wins bottle packaging for the Smirnoff No. 21 vodka, which celebrates inclusivity, acceptance and love in all its forms. “Whether it’s gender, race or, in this case, sexual orientation, we believe the best times are when everyone is included. We are proud to support the HRC and the LGBTQ community, and to celebrate all kinds of love out there.”

Love Wins is a part of the Smirnoff brand’s ongoing support of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) community, and the new bottles are the latest representation of its commitment to equality; the brand will donate $1 per bottle made, with a minimum of $260,000, to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), America’s largest organization working for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer equality.

These donations are not a plea for funds from its brand fans, Young explains, “There is no premium price for the special edition Love Wins bottles. The bottles are available for purchase at the same suggested retail price as Smirnoff No. 21 Vodka—$14.99. The one dollar per bottle donation comes directly from profit.”

Branding with purpose

Each Love Wins Smirnoff No. 21 bottle and case packaging is unique, with its iridescent rainbow aesthetic and new LGBTQ Smirnoff logo. The unique bottles feature different images of love photographed by San Francisco-based photographer Sarah Deragon, the creator of the Identity Project, which examines how people define their gender and sexuality.

“With Smirnoff Love Wins, we feature real same-sex couples on our limited-edition bottles and are highlighting love in all its forms,” Young says. “As part of our efforts, we also made a donation to the national Human Rights Campaign in an effort to make a difference and help foster safer environments for the LGBTQ community within the United States.”

The HRC represents a grassroots force of more than 1.5 million members and supporters working every day to make LGBTQ equality a reality, a cause that Diageo says directly relates to the Smirnoff brand’s core belief of inclusivity. Smirnoff, as well as its parent company Diageo, have had a long standing partnership with the HRC; Diageo has been named one of the Best Places to Work for LGBT Equality and has received a perfect score of 100% on the Corporate Equality Index for nine consecutive years.

Advertisement

Recalling the brand’s ongoing use of technology to affect good in the world, Doris Brown-McNally, HP graphic solutions business worldwide brands business development manager, says, “Diageo took learnings from a prior campaign for this cause that also used digitally printed packaging. Their first execution used drawings with vector art, but then the Smirnoff team upped the ante by allowing their consumers to upload personal photographs of themselves and then being able to geo-specifically have those images on the bottle. This is personalization on a very personal level.”

Tools that made it happen

Kevin Chop, principal packaging graphics director, Diageo, explains, “For the Smirnoff Love Wins bottles, the primary sleeve supplier, CCL Label, acquired the technology at their North American shrink sleeve site in Sioux Falls, SD. Diageo has been working with HP Indigo technology, Color-Box and CCL label, as well as other packaging vendors for years. We worked with them to apply our experience from our work on product labels to shrink sleeves.

“Because we had produced similar work on pressure-sensitive sleeves, the variable imagery on the shrink sleeves was pretty straight-forward,” he adds. “However, one of the larger technical challenges was re-registering the printed HP web on a conventional printing press to apply both an inside foil, as well as outside tactile printing techniques. With the shrink sleeves, the technical challenge of re-registration was primarily resolved on the conventional printing side of the equation.”

Creating the label artwork also was a straight-forward equation, Brown-McNally adds, “When you’re working with HP Digital Prints Solutions, you don’t have to incorporate any new software or hardware in your design. You’re using your standard Adobe InDesign creative products, and you’re strategically building layers into your product to insert either variable personal images, content or other assets based on what your individual campaign might need. It’s very comfortable for designers to work with this technology because you’re really not introducing a whole new set of tools for them to have to learn and also buy. They’re using their existing tools.”

The Love Wins project also leveraged recent breakthroughs in digital printing for corrugated. “Through our conversations with Color-Box, we learned that they had technology to produce the Love Wins shipper case,” Chop recalls. “They were challenged with getting the images and the file sizes created from a large number of images and zones to show through on the shipping container. We worked directly with them to trial the technology six months prior to the program launching to make sure everything would end up exactly how we envisioned it would be.”

Implementing digital printing technology for marketing campaigns isn’t something new for Diageo, Chop reminds, “Diageo has deployed both variable imagery and variable data applications to a number of brands and associated packaging components over the years including shrink sleeves, folding cartons and pressure sensitive labels. Over the past two or more years, there has been a trend in North America to leverage digital for a number of benefits including unique packaging components and substrates. For example, we recently printed labels on twill fabric for Bulleit Bourbon. Additionally, Orphan Barrel labels are often printed on a variety of non-traditional label stocks such as wood, laminates or leather-like materials.”

Advertisement

Brown-McNally remarks, “When I work with these brands, I find it fascinating to watch them migrate their way through the learnings in digital print. Every execution begets another execution, which begets another execution, and that is helping them find their voice.”