Dscoop delivers insight on teams and technology

Teams and technology as a foundation for business success was the theme of the Dscoop forum at PacPrint, with colourful insight brought by Australian motorsport legend Mark ‘Frosty’ Winterbottom and Little Bang Brewing Company’s founder Ryan Davidson. 

The charismatic Kelvin Gage, global board member and treasurer for Dscoop, opened the event with a snapshot of what Dscoop is all about – a community forum for HP Indigo owners and users, which number more than 15,000 and who gather at events around the world where content and ideas are shared to deliver access to knowledge, innovation, and inspiration, while also providing commercial opportunities for the businesses in the group.

On this occasion at PacPrint, Mark Winterbottom had been invited talk on teamwork. He spoke of his learnings from the time he started out carting as a kid to eventually progressing to supercars – the realm in which he made his name as a motorsports star – and the challenges that came with finding fame.

“To have fun at work in our sport is everything,” he said. “But making sure that everyone's in the right roles and working for me, I guess, is the big part [that determines success]. So, you've got to earn their respect and you've got to have the right people and you've got to deal with emotions.”

He said that when he is driving, the team on the track side looks to him for guidance, “and if you’ve got your head down you won’t see them… it may come down to getting your head up in confidence” so they can read the signals. That’s a lesson in there for any leader – pay attention to your teams and show them what you’re thinking.

He spoke also of the difficulty of losing staff poached by other competitive businesses. In an environment like printing, with skill shortages, many audience members could relate.

His next words on teamwork also rang true: “Without the right people we don't perform. We have an engineer on my car, we have data engineers… we have pit crew, mechanics, truck drivers, catering, media sponsorship, the list goes on… and so if you go through the chain and one person doesn't do their role properly, we fail,” he said.

Comparing motorsport to the printing industry, Winterbottom said: “I guess for us, our vehicle is your printing machine; you've got a piece of equipment that's meant to do something but without the human element, it's just a piece of machinery.” To get the best out of it, he implied, required getting the best out of the team operating it.

“We're always trying to recruit; we're always trying to evolve [people and technology] and we're always trying to retain experience.”

Winterbottom's final remarks related to the glory moment on the podium, which he said is a humbling experience as the driver because “you get the champagne and the trophy” but “it's very important for the team to stand there with you, although not on the podium, that they're watching and celebrating their part in the results is important”. Again, there was an analogy to be drawn here for all leaders in print businesses, to give teams credit where its due for the company’s success.

Big bang for your buck

Next up on the Dscoop podium was Ryan Davidson, founder and director of sales and brand strategy at Little Bang Brewing Company.

When Kelvin Gage introduced him, he joked that Davidson had flown in by helicopter following the sale of his company the day before. In his inimitable style, Davidson met this jest with good humour, but was at pains to reassure the audience that the craft brewery would not be losing its independence – in fact it would be “fiercely protected” – and that the sale will allow Little Bang beers to become more widely available, with the brewery growing its reach through hospitality sector channels it now has access to.

But Davidson was not there to talk about the sale, rather about how Little Bang’s beer packaging had been key to the company’s ten-year journey to this ultimate success. He described how as a start-up, with a first batch of 5000 litres, buying printed cans was cost-prohibitive because of the volumes required. The short-run solution took the form of labels, more specifically digitally printed labels – printed on an HP Indigo digital press by Peacock Bros. – that enabled not only high levels of creativity and colour variation in the artwork, but also the flexibility to print different labels for every SKU.

“I wanted to turn every beer can into my little sales rep on shelf,” Davidson said. “You have to really, really push as a small business owner; we thought that when we couldn't afford a sales team all over the country pushing our product meant the product itself had to be out there doing the selling for us. On those noisy shelves, we need our beer cans to be reaching out to the punters saying, ‘For God’s sake, pick me up’ even if it's because the punter has thought ‘What on earth even is that? I need to investigate!’

“If you can have that moment of their attention… that two seconds… then you're most of the way to winning.”

Davidson ran through some of the designs and ideas behind them that had brought Little Bang success. He discussed how the HP SmartStream Mosaic software developed by HP Indigo and running at Peacock Bros. has created labels that “really pop”. The software can be easily instructed to keep certain graphic elements the same, while allowing others to be varied with infinite combinations – creating a dynamic set of labels that look the same but are not quite the same – piquing consumer interest.

He described how at times HP Mosaic is used only sparingly, showing an example of a Union Jack design on a series of cans in which only one part of the flag colour changed – but still that’s enough to attract interest.

The company took variable data on printed labels to the next level with its Little Bang Hazy IPA, where the team spent several months developing an algorithm that gave every single beer can a different name – which has produced over 75,000 different names to date, meaning 75,000 different labels printed in runs of one. Names vary from the sublime to the ridiculous: ‘communist bird performance’ or the ‘religious chastity biscuit’, but they evoke humour, spark interest and are a talking point for the brand. “And the beauty of it is, if you get a complaint, only one has been printed and you can say you have ‘immediately recalled’ the packaging,” he joked.

Davidson worked through many more examples covering the scope of possibility with HP Mosaic software, and demonstrating how well-suited digital printing is to this level of creative marketing, allowing brands to refresh the customer experience without changing the can’s contents.

And for those members of the audience who wanted to sample first-hand the taste and feel of Little Bang’s beer cans, these were available on the PacPrint stand of HP Indigo partner and technology supplier in ANZ, Currie Group. The Little Bang themed bar had beers for tasting, and all the working presses on the stand were producing marketing collateral, from labels to menus and much more besides, that will be used by Little Bang Brewing Company after the event.