Commentary: Your Printer, Your Multimedia Solutions Provider

By Jon Fogel and Roy Grossman, pulled from www.targetmarketingmag.com

When will the economy start to turn around? What will get my business turned around quickly? Where can I get the help I need? These are some of the questions that every business owner or manager is asking right now. And the answers are tough to find. Very few, if any of us, have ever experienced the economic tsunami that we now are facing.

The conventional wisdom in many previous downturns, at least from a marketing perspective, has been to stimulate business growth by investing in advertising and promotional support. Unfortunately, what we are seeing today is just the opposite—dramatic cutbacks and, in some cases, total elimination of marketing support. Witness the automotive industry, long a critical component of advertising spending and now essentially on life support.

So what do we do? It is unlikely that corporate America will return to dramatic, widespread marketing investment anytime soon. However, we do believe that as the economy stabilizes somewhat—we hope by the second half of the year—we will start to see both a willingness and eagerness by national advertisers to spend by taking a very targeted approach to their plans. Virtually every marketer understands that the psychographics of its target audience has changed dramatically, this target audience is tougher than ever to reach effectively and that there are more media choices for reaching them than ever before.

Print, unfortunately, has a much smaller slice of the pie. Many great printing companies either are out of business or on the verge of going out of business. Sure, the economy certainly is the big reason. But there also is the matter of supply and demand that has been discussed by many pundits. Over the past 10 to 15 years, as a result of technological innovation and more productive presses, the print industry expanded capacity at a rate far greater than demand.

But guess what? Despite this scenario, there are many printing and graphic communications companies that should be your best resources to help execute your marketing plans and achieve your objectives.

Many of these companies that built their businesses as solid traditional printing companies have taken drastic steps to reinvent themselves. Some have been reactive; many have been proactive. Whatever the motivation, the print providers that have embraced the new paradigm that offering just printing services is no longer a sustainable business model are strategically positioned to be not just relevant, but critical to their clients' success. The companies that are succeeding have evolved very quickly into the dual roles of being multimedia providers and multimedia business consultants. About a year ago, we wrote that the real competition in the printing industry is not the other printing firm down the street, but the alternative forms of media that are available to marketers. In a short period, it has become very apparent that going up against this competition is not a winnable war. So as the expression goes, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

We used to be "printing companies;" then we tried the moniker "graphic communications providers." There are more and more companies (that you may remember as your local print shop) that have realized it's time to drop the titles and just figure out what it is they need to do to help marketers deliver their messages to their customers.

Senior management and ownership within the printing industry now are conversing with marketers on a variety of levels, from brand and promotional management to investor relations and environmental directors. The printing industry has gotten much smarter about fully understanding what media will be most appropriate for a given client in a given situation. And this new generation of multimedia services firms is ready to help marketers achieve their objectives by providing those media as part of a comprehensive, integrated communications package.

And just to be clear, we're still very big advocates of print. But we all need to evaluate print in conjunction with the multitude of media available.

On the Print in the Mix Web site (www.printinthemix.rit.edu), housed at Rochester Institute of Technology, The Print Council has presented very compelling evidence that the most effective communication strategies are a result of the blending of print as a vehicle with many of the "newer" media.

Procter & Gamble, one of the most successful and well-respected marketers in history, always has had a very simple proposition: Don't force customers to buy what you want to sell, but figure out what customers want to buy and then go out and deliver it. More and more companies in the "printing" industry have figured this out, and these are the companies you want as partners in the future.

Jon Fogel and Roy Grossman both are partners in MSP Digital Marketing, a new firm that intends to build a national platform in the digital printing segment specializing in sophisticated variable data and one-to-one communications solutions. Grossman can be reached at grossman.roy@gmail.com.