I’ve been around print for 25 years and I see real change afoot. Most printers used to be production-led, but not anymore. Customer demands are changing: they want better prices, shorter runs and faster turnarounds because they are under pressure and their market is changing.

What printers shouldn’t do is bury their heads in the sand and complain about over-capacity and poor market conditions, while continuing to do the same old things. They must understand and satisfy customers’ evolving needs and soothe the pain points.

Where printers have transformed themselves, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Williams Lea, for example, grew from a City report and accounts printer to the outsourcing giant it is now.

GI Solutions Group in Leicester, which pioneered in-line inkjet printing for the direct mail sector, is another success story. In September 2006, GI rebranded itself as a marketing services company with printing and data management facilities. It now handles a broad spread of campaign and customer management needs and provides services to help clients attract and retain customers and revenue.

This ranges from customer insight, through strategy and targeting development, to campaign execution and management, creative print and mail, and response capture. GI has developed new document and print management services, as well as establishing a solid track record in data-driven marketing with proprietary software developed in-house.

It sorts customer data for on-press inkjet, pre-press and lasering with its Delphax lines and now offers variable full-colour inkjet with the £4m investment in Europe’s first Screen Truepress Jet520 lines.

GI is a significant player but smaller companies could follow similar strategies to make themselves more useful to their customers.

There is less of a risk in providing more services for existing customers, so building and developing relationships is worthwhile, but hard to do unless you can adapt.

If this sounds daunting, don’t worry. You don’t have to do it all by yourself. Work with your suppliers to broaden your range of competences.

The Duncan Print Group, in Welwyn Garden City, has got the right idea. It is a member of the Communication Business Partnership (www.cbpinter-national.com), an international group of service firms that offer services such as design, PR, campaign execution, call centres and event management that the company can offer to its clients in addition to print.
Duncan doesn’t try to do everything itself, but uses expert partners to provide services, broadening the customer offering at low risk.

Darwin also said: In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. Fortunately for the sector, many printers are taking this lesson to heart and developing strategies to adapt and provide new services and products for their customers.

Sean Smyth is an independent technical consultant in the print sector. Email sean.smyth@dsl.pipex.com