Digimarc Corporation announced that Schawk, part of the SGK Brand Solutions group of Matthews International Corporation, and a trusted advisor in the deployment of brands worldwide has become a certified provider of Digimarc Barcode. The alliance provides an opportunity for brands to enhance the consumer shopping experience by improving ease and speed of scanning at checkout, creating valuable mobile engagement options in aisle and at home, and laying the foundation for numerous other valuable applications in brand management, manufacturing and logistics.

With more than 60 years of experience advising many of the world’s leading brands on marketing services supply chain efficiencies, Schawk seeks out innovative opportunities to help their clients strategically address growing consumer and market trends to help drive brand performance. The company aims to protect brand assets worldwide by producing superior quality assets to ensure consistency across media channels. Digimarc Barcode works to give brands unique opportunities to succeed in the store by directing consumers back to retailer and brand-owned sites and providing additional product information, a growing expectation of customers tethered to their smartphones while browsing store shelves.

Retailer private brands can deliver significant increases in the speed of scanning at checkout, saving millions of dollars over the course of a year for retailers, depending on the size of the organization. At the same time, the improved self-checkout experience increases customer satisfaction and builds brand loyalty, a necessity in the age of online shopping and infinite customer choice.

Digimarc Barcode, backed by Digimarc’s more than 20 years of experience as a pioneer and world leader in automatic detection of media, is essentially invisible to the human eye but can easily be read by mobile phone cameras, tablets, POS scanners and other network interfaces.

For Schawk clients, incorporating Digimarc Barcode is now as simple as contacting their Schawk client representative to request enhanced packaging featuring Digimarc Barcode.

“Next-generation packaging is a package that is responsive to consumer behavior, retail experiences and cultural phenomena. Packaging has to create greater value for consumers, retailers and manufacturers,” says Bruce Miller, vice president of product development at Schawk. “The connected package does this by becoming part of the digital stream of information, communication and transaction. It becomes more useful and as a result, weaves itself seamlessly into the lives of consumers and the logistics of retailers, delivering greater value to all. Digimarc is a great partner to enable the connected package.”

By joining the Digimarc Channel Partner Program, Schawk broadens availability of the Digimarc Discover and Barcode platform among major international brands. The Program is designed to provide multiple sources of supply of key elements of critical infrastructure for globalization of the platform. Via the Program, Digimarc works closely with its partners to drive value and ease of use for participating suppliers and their customers.

“Schawk is a tremendously respected brand in the packaging space and has long understood the importance of marketing in packaging design,” says Sean Calhoon, vice president of product management at Digimarc. “By enhancing their products with Digimarc Barcode, the brands that rely on Schawk will create packaging that wins at the shelf while future-proofing their packaging for exciting new applications.”

Discover more about Digimarc Barcode.