One of the things that troubled me even then was how commoditised print had become after Black Wednesday, he says. Mitchell says when he formed Astron he wanted to differentiate the firm and get away from the commodity trap, and it’s not lost on him that printers accused him, along with others in that sector, of leading commoditisation.
Mitchell’s solution to escaping commoditisation was to focus on understanding customers’ requirements. Increasingly, that led the firm to tackle issues related to their use of printed products in their business, such as logistics (ensuring the right documents were in the right place at the right time) and ultimately managing huge parts of customers’ client communications, including inbound and outbound call centres. Wherever there was complexity, there was money to be made, he says.
He was inspired by an even older piece of writing dating to 1960, Theodore Levitt’s Harvard paper Marketing Myopia. At the heart of the paper is the idea that firms and industries get into trouble because they focus on selling, and their needs, rather than on customers’ needs and marketing. Levitt cites the railways as a prime example of an industry in trouble because its managers assumed they were in the railway business and not the transport business – they were product-oriented rather than customer-oriented.
Even today, the majority of printers would choose to define themselves by the type of equipment they run and their products rather than the market sectors and type of customers they serve. As for focusing on their needs rather than the clients’, how much time do we as an industry spend complaining about price and margin erosion rather than seeking out ideas from our customers about what would make their lives easier and us a little bit more essential?
There are signs that some firms have learnt the lessons that Mitchell mastered during the last recession in time to better weather what looks increasingly like the next one. Mitchell’s former employer, St Ives, is one company that has much more recently embraced change and the concepts of marketing and providing services as much as products.
For other firms, the potential offered by digital is allowing them to re-invent themselves as more than just printers by moving into a broader spectrum of communications. While it’s interesting, if depressing, to look back and see parallels with the past that show that little may have changed in many printers’ outlooks, it can also be seen as exciting in that there are so many opportunities still out there. It would be nice to think that out of the tough times ahead at least one person manages to match Mitchell’s magic and enjoys similar success by building a firm with roots in print. It will also be fascinating to see how customer requirements will grow the business beyond print.
Barney Cox is executive editor, Print Group Haymarket
Print must avoid the commodity trap
While researching the history of print management for the recent Stationers' debate on the future of print procurement, I asked Astron founder David Mitchell, one of the pioneers of print management (or to give it his preferred name 'business process outsourcing') about the genesis of his firm and the sub-sequent development of the print management phenomenon. The roots of Astron lie in the last UK-wide recession in the early 1990s, and ultimately back to Black Wednesday more than 20 years ago.
