Reality Check: What to expect when buying different print products for a campaign. brand Color reproduction across print substrates and technologies.

This study is a continuation of a previous study on why most Brand Manuals fail when it comes to specifying Brand Colors (Pedersen 2016).
This present study seeks to examine the practical consequences of the previous study by conducting a spot check of 226 randomly chosen print products from 43 randomly chosen companies. These print products where printed on both paper, foil/film, nylon, polyester, metal, cotton and other substrates.
The print products where produced in different print technologies, such as lithographic offset, flexographic print, screen print, gravure and digital print and they were produced both locally in Denmark and from print suppliers around the world.
66 % of the 226 print products where printed in CMYK while 34% where printed as spot color (one color Pantone).
The 226 print products were measured directly on the printed image, where the logo or brand color was located and color differences (ΔE2000) were calculated in relation to the company's brand color specifications.
Only 13.7 % (31) of these 226 print products had a color difference ≤ 3 ΔE2000 More than 50% of the 226 print products had a color difference above 6 ΔE2000 and 19% (43) had a color difference above 10 ΔE2000
Whether the relatively large color differences are due to inappropriate color specification in the Brand Manuals or if there is a general inattention in the printing companies is not to be said.
However, it must be presumed that the international process standards in the ISO 12647 series haven’t played a significant role in the production of these 43 companies' 226 print products.