The challenges facing our industry in 2006 can be summed up in this way:
- Delivering 'More than print'
- Rising costs against falling prices
- Enlargement and globalisation
- Recruitment and training
- Technology and the environment
Each month for the next five months starting in August we will debate through the website if each of the presumed challenges is real, and invite contributions from companies in the City Fringe to express their own view and how their company is meeting these challenges.
This month we are debating 'more than print'.
We often hear the words that "such and such a company is a provider of integrated solutions". It sounds very good, a bit posh and as if it might be the reason for a price increase! But every printing company knows that price increases are a thing of the past. Print is a volume industry with high service content and that element has to be spot-on all the time, every time. Is the trick today in having a successful printing company to be offering 'more than' (just print) at lower prices but very heavily dependent on service?
The cost of entry into the industry is high and any new investment has to be carefully costed. Our customers will not pay for an enhanced service (as a result of the investment) but they will subscribe to it by using it, sub-contracting to it and then recommending it to others. It is simply no longer good enough to offer pre-press, printing and finishing services. Anyone can do that. What makes it unattractive to the customer is the cost (in terms of both time and money) associated with moving the product in either its information only stage or as a printed and bound document.
Customers do not wish to have storage issues or the loss of access to their intellectual property. Their customers will anticipate having access to the information immediately and that it can be amended if an important change is made at any time in the future.
Consider newspapers. Twenty years ago the ink rubbed off on your hands, the colour was variable and the supply often interrupted. Now it is completely different. The quality of printing is excellent, the service just as excellent, the content is up to date and the papers have grown in size greater in percentage terms as the price has increased. We now have a free daily national newspaper - The Metro, and newspaper publishers are realising (in the face of growing competition from TV, radio and the Internet), that their publishing medium 'the newspaper' has a real opportunity for growth. And this could be by being provided free or at a low cost to the end-user, the reader.
That is, therefore, the challenge to the printing industry in general. How can it survive and grow, by offering more at a lower cost that will attract its local, national and international customers?
It can only do it by offering 'more than'.
What do you think?