Office and Commercial Printing Industries Both Turn to Solutions to Grow
I had the opportunity to attend the Executive Outlook Conference at this year's Graph Expo. I learned that the commercial printing industry is undergoing a shift similar to that of office printing—one towards solution sales. It's really a shift taking place across all industries, as companies outsource functions that are outside of their core business to external experts.
At the Executive Outlook Conference, there seemed to be a large focus on the economic recession and continual decline in business for commercial printers. I began to think that our industry is lucky that we got on board with managed print services when we did. While the recession took a toll on almost all businesses, MPS offered customers a strong value proposition and, importantly at the time, potential cost savings. Although I haven't followed the commercial printing industry closely, it seemed to me that they are still in the early stages of transitioning to a solutions model.
Another similarity between the commercial and office printing industries is that the markets are flat to declining. To grow your business, you have to take it from someone else. To do that, you have to offer customers greater value, which means offering additional services and solutions that will in turn grow your business. There are great ways in which commercial printers are offering more value. Instead of just taking content from the client and printing thousands of identical copies, commercial printers are now helping clients gather and analyze data about their market so they can develop highly customized content for each target segment. The printing technology available today is capable of short, customized print jobs, which offer much more value to customers. And it's not just about hard copy anymore—marketing campaigns need to be cross-media, with an online focus, and commercial printers are helping their clients achieve this. Frankly, our industry isn't helping commercial printers; it's getting easier to print documents in relatively high quality in-house, but commercial printers are offering much more than that.
One presentation noted that sometimes all that’s needed is a change in syntax. It's not commercial printing, it's targeted content delivery. It's not the commodity of printed documents, it's the solution to building a targeted marketing campaign. It's not about being a vendor, it's about being a long-term partner. Sound familiar?
I have to say that the commercial printing (targeted content delivery) industry has a lot of neat things that make the geek in me get excited: illuminated paper, e-ink, scent strips, flavour strips, and yes, those massive printers that fill a room.
One thing is for sure—there will always be a need for content, documents, and in some form, printing. As a result, there will inevitably be demand for companies that help manage all of these.
Posted by Emily Offshack on 10/28/2010