Does your brand recognise its digital twin?
Harry Corsham, partner at Town Square, explains why your product’s immaculate packaging is only telling half the story. Out there somewhere is a neglected digital twin: out-dated, living across countless e-commerce sites and databases, and possibly doing real brand damage.
Miss one update in one database, and suddenly your product information can be dangerously wrong
You’re standing in the pasta sauce aisle, scanning a label that’s a masterwork of information architecture.
Every millimetre serves a purpose. Ingredients, nutritional facts, expiry date, allergen warnings, storage advice, serving suggestions, country of manufacture, a URL for the brand’s website and even a postal address. Then of course there is a perfectly photographed, enticing tomato, that promises culinary bliss. This humble jar carries a lot of crucial information, compressed into a space the size of, or often smaller than a business card. And let’s not forget the barcode, the packaging innovation that since 1979 has enabled retailers to add this jar of pasta sauce to my bill, without the need to manually punch the price into a cash register.
But with the explosion of online shopping, that beautifully crafted physical label is only half the story. Somewhere in the digital ether, that brand has a twin, a data double living across countless databases, e-commerce platforms, and AI systems. And chances are, that twin is broken, outdated, or downright unrecognisable.
For clarity, 2D barcodes, also known as Next Generation barcodes, are available for use today. The 2027 date is when all retailers have been asked to update their scanning systems to support these codes at retail point-of-sale. Then the same Next Gen code will scan at POS and provide greater information to consumers when they scan using their smartphones.
More information can be found here http://www.gs1au.org/standards/2d-barcodes