Decision making about investments in print is something that is largely deferred to outside forces, despite what the team may claim. This might be a press salesman, a customer looking for a specific digital press or competitor business that has recently made an investment that appears to be working well. Rarely does a business make an investment decision without some level of influence from some third party, however well intentioned. There is nothing wrong with this: the choice of appropriate technology should inform a decision, the attitude and opinion of key customers can be vital and of course everyone wants to emulate the success that a rival has by delivering something similar, but of course better.
It is an entirely logical process and one that has worked for many in print for many years, especially in prosperous times when technology was stable or was limited to what kind of litho press for long runs and what kind of digital press for short runs. With a surplus of demand over supply making a wrong call might be painful, but rarely fatal. The commoditisation of print has been the result. Conditions are no longer like that and pursuing a ‘follow my leader’ approach to investment may be but a slippery slope to the madhouse or failing that, the court of chancery. Printers understand that they need a USP or a niche. More of the same is unlikely to deliver that.
Decision making today, both about investment and strategy, needs a clear head and ideally a clean sheet of paper. The challenge is to minimise the outside influences, to be master of them rather than to be driven by them, to be guided by the past but not stuck in it.
In his novel The Go-Between, LP Hartley wrote “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. Looking back a generation in print and this is certainly true. Great names have vanished, Crosfield, Scitex, Solna among them. Litho was supreme and digital printing a minority concern. There were abundant readers for magazines, books and mail order catalogues; there was so much printed direct mail, it was labelled junk mail. All these are markets that have undergone almost unthinkable change.
Now looking forward, the decision maker’s challenge is to pick out the markets that are going to undergo an unthinkable change in the new few years. By definition this is not straightforward. Has the magazine sector transformed to the extent it is no longer shrinking; what is the shape of things to come in book publishing; how will business to consumer marketing evolve? These are the questions that leading companies are asking beyond the two or three year window that their customers operate within. How can printers think the unthinkable and prepare for that. Customers too can have difficulty predicting their own future. It is difficult for anyone to anticipate the demise of their own business model. There is always a tendency to believe that we are the exceptions that prove the rule. Perhaps we can survive as others around us are driven out of business and we pick up their work – it’s not a great strategy in reality.
However, there are now examples of businesses that have anticipated the existential reality and, to use the current idiom, have performed a pivot. For example, many in commercial print are eyeing up the opportunities in packaging, cartons especially. It has appeal. It’s a market that is changing, but it also one with a different set of skills and pressures to commercial print, even if the technology used is superficially similar.
In the US there are examples now of larger companies that specialised in long run direct mail of the spray and pray kind: vast print runs with the same message printed by web offset presses with minimal personalisation. They are changing from this model. It is no longer effective for their customers. Instead they have swapped web offset presses for inkjet machines and are focusing on more targeted messages for their customers. It is not clear if this is about improving sustainability (unlikely in the US), whether it’s driven by the rising cost of mail or by a realisation that better data and better targeting deliver better results. The investment in a campaign is now focused on pre-production decisions. The profiling of the audience and the different messages to deliver to each segment that will trigger a response that can be converted into a purchase.
These companies have read the runes and although it will mean taking a hit on revenue, there will be benefits to the bottom line.
Another example is the complete change in direction that label press manufacturer Gallus is taking. Having been a bit sniffy about digital print technology in the past, the label and packaging press supplier has ditched a strategy of optimising flexo printing and an inline finishing set up that promotes speed and productivity over versatility. The switch in its vision, its company purpose, followed research into the behavioural habits of the next generation of consumers. What they are influenced by seems completely different to what has influenced similar age groups in the past. The next generation it seems is completely different.
Of course it was ever thus. Every new generation believes itself to be distinct from those that have preceded it and then finds itself adopting the habits of its parent’s generation. This time things may be different, for not only is the new consumer completely au fait with digital media and especially the nuances between social media channels, this is a generation growing up to face a world that has been ecologically damaged by its forebears. If the human race is not be eliminated by climate change, lifestyles and habits must change. Those attitudes are not going to change as they age. What influences their choice of products, what creates appeal seems to include higher degrees of personalisation, labels and packaging as part of the experience.
Certainly the insight that Gallus gained from research it conducted looking at the influences on its customers and how they might evolve in the next few years made the company realise that a highly efficient long run press might not be targeting the growing part of its market.
Printers too need to carry out this sort of research, either directly with its own customers to understand their strategic thinking in the face of changing markets. or through enquiring widely to better understand the context in which marketing and communication choices are made. Two maps are needed: the overall view of the landscape to come and a more detailed map focusing on individual customers and prospects.
The alternative is that a print business looks at the world through from their current position and from the perspective of the suppliers they deal with. It is all too easy to continue to deal with the devil you know rather than to stand back to take a realistic look at a technology that all the hype on one side says is wonderful and from the other declares it is anything but. What was true in terms of quality three or four years ago may no longer make sense sense in business terms. Because that is how companies must view things. Companies that produced some of the finest print in the country are no longer here.
It means that printers must shake off the instincts and habits to go with the herd. They need to challenge any tendency towards Groupthink, or a hive mind, where everyone falls in line with what appears to be a logical choice, but results in an over crowded environment. One of the most successful business books of recent years promoted the idea of Blue Ocean Thinking, urging readers to take their companies out of the blood stained waters closer to land. Companies have to think and act independently.
It used to be said that companies would buy IBM technology, not because it was the best, but “because nobody was ever fired for buying Big Blue”. A colleague at college produced a dissertation about the malign influence that IBM’s powerful mainframes were having on developing countries because they would be forced to kow-tow to the computer giant. It seems laughable now, but this was the orthodox position at the time.
Groupthink like this can be dangerous. During the inquiry into the UK’s preparedness for a pandemic, a number of witnesses blamed Groupthink for the apparent blindness towards a coronavirus, we were well prepared for a flu epidemic, but not it seems for what we got.
The characteristics of herd mentality of Groupthink include placing corporate cohesion above an uncomfortable challenge from a stakeholder in that business. It is all too easy to accept a decision and to swallow any misapprehension there might be for the sake of that cohesion. The boss is always right.
This is simply wrong. Decision making like this, which seems unanimous, can create barriers to the introduction of new ways of thinking, particularly where one person holds excess power by dint of personality or ownership of the business. It creates complacency and the illusion that the correct decision has been arrived at with the support of all involved and is therefore a better choice than another business might make. That is an illusion, but one that third party suppliers or even customers can encourage, deliberately or otherwise.
Information and help is available. There are exhibitions to enable comparison between different suppliers and to stumble across products and services that might never otherwise cross your path. There are websites to visit, seminars to attend. And of course magazines to read. Not all information out there is independent, so the seeker must take care. But the end result will be worth it.
Choose the path carefully
Decision making about investments in print is something that is largely deferred to outside forces, despite what the team may claim. This might be a press salesman, a customer looking for a specific digital press or competitor business that has recently made an investment that appears to be working well. Rarely does a business make an investment decision without some level of influence from some third party, however well intentioned. There is nothing wrong with this: the choice of appropriate technology should inform a decision, the attitude and opinion of key customers can be vital and of course everyone wants to emulate the success that a rival has by delivering something similar, but of course better.
It is an entirely logical process and one that has worked for many in print for many years, especially in prosperous times when technology was stable or was limited to what kind of litho press for long runs and what kind of digital press for short runs. With a surplus of demand over supply making a wrong call might be painful, but rarely fatal. The commoditisation of print has been the result. Conditions are no longer like that and pursuing a ‘follow my leader’ approach to investment may be but a slippery slope to the madhouse or failing that, the court of chancery. Printers understand that they need a USP or a niche. More of the same is unlikely to deliver that.
Decision making today, both about investment and strategy, needs a clear head and ideally a clean sheet of paper. The challenge is to minimise the outside influences, to be master of them rather than to be driven by them, to be guided by the past but not stuck in it.
In his novel The Go-Between, LP Hartley wrote “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. Looking back a generation in print and this is certainly true. Great names have vanished, Crosfield, Scitex, Solna among them. Litho was supreme and digital printing a minority concern. There were abundant readers for magazines, books and mail order catalogues; there was so much printed direct mail, it was labelled junk mail. All these are markets that have undergone almost unthinkable change.
Now looking forward, the decision maker’s challenge is to pick out the markets that are going to undergo an unthinkable change in the new few years. By definition this is not straightforward. Has the magazine sector transformed to the extent it is no longer shrinking; what is the shape of things to come in book publishing; how will business to consumer marketing evolve? These are the questions that leading companies are asking beyond the two or three year window that their customers operate within. How can printers think the unthinkable and prepare for that. Customers too can have difficulty predicting their own future. It is difficult for anyone to anticipate the demise of their own business model. There is always a tendency to believe that we are the exceptions that prove the rule. Perhaps we can survive as others around us are driven out of business and we pick up their work – it’s not a great strategy in reality.
However, there are now examples of businesses that have anticipated the existential reality and, to use the current idiom, have performed a pivot. For example, many in commercial print are eyeing up the opportunities in packaging, cartons especially. It has appeal. It’s a market that is changing, but it also one with a different set of skills and pressures to commercial print, even if the technology used is superficially similar.
In the US there are examples now of larger companies that specialised in long run direct mail of the spray and pray kind: vast print runs with the same message printed by web offset presses with minimal personalisation. They are changing from this model. It is no longer effective for their customers. Instead they have swapped web offset presses for inkjet machines and are focusing on more targeted messages for their customers. It is not clear if this is about improving sustainability (unlikely in the US), whether it’s driven by the rising cost of mail or by a realisation that better data and better targeting deliver better results. The investment in a campaign is now focused on pre-production decisions. The profiling of the audience and the different messages to deliver to each segment that will trigger a response that can be converted into a purchase.
These companies have read the runes and although it will mean taking a hit on revenue, there will be benefits to the bottom line.
Another example is the complete change in direction that label press manufacturer Gallus is taking. Having been a bit sniffy about digital print technology in the past, the label and packaging press supplier has ditched a strategy of optimising flexo printing and an inline finishing set up that promotes speed and productivity over versatility. The switch in its vision, its company purpose, followed research into the behavioural habits of the next generation of consumers. What they are influenced by seems completely different to what has influenced similar age groups in the past. The next generation it seems is completely different.
Of course it was ever thus. Every new generation believes itself to be distinct from those that have preceded it and then finds itself adopting the habits of its parent’s generation. This time things may be different, for not only is the new consumer completely au fait with digital media and especially the nuances between social media channels, this is a generation growing up to face a world that has been ecologically damaged by its forebears. If the human race is not be eliminated by climate change, lifestyles and habits must change. Those attitudes are not going to change as they age. What influences their choice of products, what creates appeal seems to include higher degrees of personalisation, labels and packaging as part of the experience.
Certainly the insight that Gallus gained from research it conducted looking at the influences on its customers and how they might evolve in the next few years made the company realise that a highly efficient long run press might not be targeting the growing part of its market.
Printers too need to carry out this sort of research, either directly with its own customers to understand their strategic thinking in the face of changing markets. or through enquiring widely to better understand the context in which marketing and communication choices are made. Two maps are needed: the overall view of the landscape to come and a more detailed map focusing on individual customers and prospects.
The alternative is that a print business looks at the world through from their current position and from the perspective of the suppliers they deal with. It is all too easy to continue to deal with the devil you know rather than to stand back to take a realistic look at a technology that all the hype on one side says is wonderful and from the other declares it is anything but. What was true in terms of quality three or four years ago may no longer make sense sense in business terms. Because that is how companies must view things. Companies that produced some of the finest print in the country are no longer here.
It means that printers must shake off the instincts and habits to go with the herd. They need to challenge any tendency towards Groupthink, or a hive mind, where everyone falls in line with what appears to be a logical choice, but results in an over crowded environment. One of the most successful business books of recent years promoted the idea of Blue Ocean Thinking, urging readers to take their companies out of the blood stained waters closer to land. Companies have to think and act independently.
It used to be said that companies would buy IBM technology, not because it was the best, but “because nobody was ever fired for buying Big Blue”. A colleague at college produced a dissertation about the malign influence that IBM’s powerful mainframes were having on developing countries because they would be forced to kow-tow to the computer giant. It seems laughable now, but this was the orthodox position at the time.
Groupthink like this can be dangerous. During the inquiry into the UK’s preparedness for a pandemic, a number of witnesses blamed Groupthink for the apparent blindness towards a coronavirus, we were well prepared for a flu epidemic, but not it seems for what we got.
The characteristics of herd mentality of Groupthink include placing corporate cohesion above an uncomfortable challenge from a stakeholder in that business. It is all too easy to accept a decision and to swallow any misapprehension there might be for the sake of that cohesion. The boss is always right.
This is simply wrong. Decision making like this, which seems unanimous, can create barriers to the introduction of new ways of thinking, particularly where one person holds excess power by dint of personality or ownership of the business. It creates complacency and the illusion that the correct decision has been arrived at with the support of all involved and is therefore a better choice than another business might make. That is an illusion, but one that third party suppliers or even customers can encourage, deliberately or otherwise.
Information and help is available. There are exhibitions to enable comparison between different suppliers and to stumble across products and services that might never otherwise cross your path. There are websites to visit, seminars to attend. And of course magazines to read. Not all information out there is independent, so the seeker must take care. But the end result will be worth it.
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Prayers for the future of the print industry