But more significant is the poor brand image that we project as an industry. In a recent workshop, when asked how prospective clients perceived print, the following was offered up: expensive, old fashioned, slow, irrelevant. The common perception of the print salesman is of a creature very much like a secondhand car dealer.
Of course, none of this applies to us at Precision – well I hope it doesn’t – but deep down I know that, like many of us, I have been guilty of some of the sins that have brought us as an industry to this point.
Every time we talk to customers about ‘XL this and dpi that’ or ‘ISO blah de blah’, they nod politely, but they’re thinking: ‘Get me out of here!’ Every time we ask for an ‘opportunity to quote’, we are essentially just training our customers to buy our product purely on price.
We spend our whole time talking about the ‘how’ and perhaps don’t understand the ‘why’; we all need to be experts in why and where our product works – not just be technical experts on how it is delivered.
In the face of such challenges, it became clear to me that my peers are no longer the main competition. Instead, they are the potential solution to kickstarting our wonderful industry into growth. That is why I decided to become involved with Dscoop and the BPIF.
Because here’s the truth: when a competitor holds a successful client meeting and discusses outcomes and why a particular approach will deliver the desired results, they not only do a job for their business, but are also create an argument for print.
On the principle that everything we do and say affects our brand, we need this type of experience to be the norm rather than the exception. That can only be achieved with a collective effort.
We don’t need to become MSPs (no one knows what they are anyway), but we do need to be POEs: print outcomes experts. This is where organisations like Dscoop, BPIF, Two Sides, Print Power and others can play a role.
By working together and sharing best practice, we can rebuild the industry’s image not by a fancy ad campaign, but by transforming the experience that matters the most: the client’s.
Impossible? Not if we all play a role. Dscoop has over 7,000 members worldwide. The education and networking we share helps develop that collective voice on the ground. A collective effort of printers, manufacturers, software suppliers and paper/consumables suppliers, we work together towards a common goal: more pages at greater margin.
Most of us are simply accidental businessman using experience acquired through trial and error. However, if we work together, we could eliminate the guesswork and start to reverse the sins of the past to rebuild our industry by rebuilding our market and margin.
– Gary Peeling, Managing director, Precision Printing
This comment is a response to this PrintWeek Briefing about peer-to-peer learning
