We talk to printers as partners, vendors, and customers weekly. The conversations are pretty much all the same.
The print industry must avoid becoming myopic. Capital investments should be in digital presses. Print is a commodity and solution-selling is the wave of the future. Online media is killing our steady-eddy print jobs like manuals and booklets. All these comments come from printers, not us.
Knowing the print industry’s frame of reference consider this, business-to-business marketers expect little change to the marketing mix in 2010 with a couple exceptions. Online spend is expected to more than double in size. Print media will remain unchanged, meaning increases and decreases in spend should be a wash.
Staring down the barrel of a digital migration, printers are poised to seize opportunities that tie the old to the new if they are willing to evolve. Printers are their own worst enemy. They struggle to sell solutions that both take advantage of print capabilities and incorporate web components to quantify the impact of a printed piece.
The days of counting coupons at the register are fast coming to a close. The dot com industry figured out how to sell online, how to build loyalty online, and how to bypass print media. It’s up to the print industry to prove relevance. Evolution on the web is measured in days and weeks. It doesn’t require a capital investment in a four-up press. The web is nimble.
There will be more consolidation in the print industry. The printers that don’t evolve will fall by the wayside. The others will leverage new and old media to deliver proven value to their customers. We’d love to hear what printers are doing to evolve their businesses. Comments gladly posted below with little filter.
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Similar to the simplistic misconception of the Business Week article in 1975 that predicted the future ‘paperless office’ there are many online businesses that have failed to understand the power of print to drive eye balls to their sites or increase the impact of their communications. I can’t agree more that many printers fail to see the future shift of the print market, or wear blinders and see anything online as competition. Printing will always serve a purpose but savvy print companies will need to continually evolve so that they offer solutions that compliment and enforce all forms of communications.
Not to be overlooked is that those of us pushing a primarily digital solution can’t write of print, because it is so effective when driving traffic to the web.