Quick Printing

Not long after Graphics of the Americas wound down, QP got a call from an irate reader who had attended a presentation by to-the-trade printer 4over announcing a new program called Project Red Tag. According to the reader, this program would threaten quick and small commercial printers by going directly to end users to solicit business.

Naturally, we called 4over to see what was up. When we relayed these concerns, 4Over owner Zarik Megerdichian and director of marketing Veraz Gharakhanian assured me that this was not the case. As it was explained to me, Project Red Tag, which is due to roll out sometime this month, is part of a recently introduced loyalty program for its best customers that will give them both a cash payment and contact information for orders placed online from their geographic area. The two also sent me several laudatory emails from others who were at the GOA event.

Until we see the nuts and bolts after the official launch, there are still some unanswered questions about just how this program will work and what, if any, fees or other strings might be attached. In other words, it’s too early to pass judgment. That said, I found Megerdichian’s comment in an email following our phone conversation of interest. “It is great to see how you guys were on top of this story…trying to protect the exact same group of people that kept us in business for years—we are on the same page with you.”

Stay tuned.

Who could imagine a Graph Expo without Heidelberg? Well, that’s what’s in store for 2010 with both Heidelberg and Komori taking a pass this year.

Who could imaging Graphics of the Americas being held anywhere but Miami? Well, that’s what’s in store for 2011 as the show moves upstate to Orlando.

Significant changes? Of course. Earth-shattering? Not really.

First, Heidelberg spent a ton of money on Print 09, bringing in huge iron despite the company’s fiscal problems, so it isn’t much of a surprise that they are reallocating resources. They’ll do IPEX this year and Graph Expo next year. Meanwhile, HP jumped at the chance to grab Heidelberg’s prime show real estate and will be front and center in 2010. No, offset isn’t dead, but digital is going to continue to claim more and more of the spotlight as the printing industry evolves.

As far as GOA is concerned, the move from Miami to Orlando is an attempt to attract more North American attendees while still holding onto the South American contingent. Will Mouseland’s vacation opportunities be enough to offset Miami’s appeal to South American printers? We’ll see soon enough. GOA had obviously lost a lot of its North American appeal over the past couple of years. If you could only go to one major printing show, would you pick Orlando over Chicago rather than Miami over Chicago?

I’d still pick Chicago simply because I like that city better than either Miami or Orlando. Oh, and then there is the fact that, even with the offset defections, Graph Expo is simply a better all-round show.

More than 1,500 users of HP Indigo and wide-format technology attended the Dscoop users’ group event in Dallas last week.

I was at the first Dscoop five years ago. There were a couple hundred people there and at the time I had some doubts that this fledgling group would ever amount to much. After all, it was conceived as an independent group of users of HP equipment, but it relied heavily on the support of HP itself. How independent could it be?

Obviously, the folks behind the Dscoop organization have made it work. The group does more than gather once a year for a conference and trade show. It also offers members year-round educational opportunities, peer groups for owners and technicians, online discussion forums, and discounts from “partners.” There were some 80 partners at the Dallas event, ranging from Adobe to xpdex and featuring many major players in the digital production printing arena.

Certainly, HP’s support was obvious, but the event revolved around current users and only a tiny handful of prospective buyers of HP equipment was invited. The four educational tracks (Business & Sales, Operations, Labels & Packaging, and Large-Format & Signage) offered practical content, mostly devoid of sales pitches. All in all, this was a very impressive example of how a vendor and its customers can interact for their mutual benefit.

Just now, I was looking out the window watching the snow plow clear our street. I was supposed to be on Marco Island at the NAPL Top Management Conference, but a broken airplane and cancelled flights kept me at home in West Virginia. Somehow missing out on a trip to Florida hurts a lot more when it’s 23 degrees outside with more snow in the forecast. No wonder the Roaming Gnome has cabin fever.

This is the last year for the Top Management Conference. In 2011 this NAPL event will be combined with the Printing Industries of America’s President’s Conference and the NPES Annual Meeting under the auspices of the Graphic Arts Show Company (GASC). That’s probably a wise move since there is significant similarity in the profiles of attendees at the three separate events. However, it leaves a substantial portion of the printing industry under-presented.

Entrepreneurial small commercial and quick printers are not necessarily going to be drawn to a top management or president-oriented event. They have different issues and interests. Sure, there are mutual areas of concern, but they are not “managers” nor do they think like “presidents.” They think like owners. It’s their personal hide on the line every day. The imperatives are different.

The one national venue still around for the entrepreneurial small commercial printer is the NAQP Owners Conference, which is usually held just prior to Graph Expo in Chicago. Unfortunately, it seldom attracts attendees who are not NAQP members. A large percentage of NAPL members are small commercial entrepreneurs who would benefit greatly from attending the Owners Conference. Since NAQP and NAPL have merged, it would be nice to see a major push to get those entrepreneurial NAPL folks to attend a conference much more tailored to their needs than this new combined industry gathering of presidents, managers, and other corporate types.

Do you know any printers who measure success in ways other than sales volume?

There is a letter in the February issue of Quick Printing from Tom Rockers in Independence, MO, that made a very good point. Success is not always measured in dollars. Some successes “are measured in other areas such as friendships my wife and I have made with most of our customers. You cannot put a dollar sign on that type of reward,” Rockers wrote. He also said that it would be nice to read about printers who have been successful even if they are not million dollar shops. I think that is a fine idea.

Do you know someone who measures success in ways other than sales volume? If so, let us know about them and perhaps we’ll share their story in a future issue. Remember the old adage, “Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well.”

The NAQP Operating Ratio Study has a new name, but the value of the information hasn’t changed.

It used to be called the NAQP Operating Ratio Study, but for 2010 and beyond the name will be the Financial Benchmarking Survey. I’m not sure why the powers that be changed the name, but I’m glad to see that they didn’t change the survey itself. After all, it is one of the most valuable—if not the most sexy—studies done by the association.

The survey asks 65 key questions which can be answered by using a company’s 2009 year-end financial statements. Participants will get a free copy of the finished survey and an individually customized report which they can use to make a side-by-side comparison of their profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and key financial ratios with other printing companies. In the past, the offer of this free customized report has really encouraged participation. Survey author John Stewart says he expects even greater participation in the 2010 survey

You don’t have to be an NAQP or NAPL member to participate in the 2010 Financial Benchmark Survey, and I really think you’re missing a good bet if you don’t participate. (Printers who don’t participate will still be able to buy copy of the completed study.)

Email invitations to participate will go out in mid-February. If you do not receive one, you can still participate by going to www.surveyadvantage.com/NAQP10financial to download the survey, which can be submitted electronically or by mail. The drop-dead deadline is March 22, 2010. Don’t miss out on one of the best financial management tools available to our industry.

I just got the latest Economic & Print Market Flash Report from Printing Industries of America. There wasn’t anything really surprising in it. The economy should stabilize in 2010, along with printing shipments, and grow modestly in 2011. Conventional ink-on-paper printing will continue to decline in 2010 and stabilize in 2011. Etc. All that said, there will be some segments that will fare better than others. Among them, digital print, both toner-based and inkjet, should grow between 4% and 5% over the next two years. Meanwhile, ancillary services will also grow, by 2.7% in 2010 and 4% in 2011.

None of this is any reason to throw a party, but it is better news than we have been getting for the past couple of years. Right now that’s about all we can expect.

Well, we just got the February issue of Quick Printing out to the printer. It should be in your mailbox the first week in February and up on our website around the same time. Everybody knows that trade magazines in our industry don’t have as many pages as they used to, however we managed to get a lot of good content in the space we had available.

Karen interviews vendors on CTP advantages and trends, Nancy DeDiemar outlines the challenges ahead for printers, mailers, and the USPS, and John Giles discusses Quark Marketing Services and QR codes. Meanwhile, Dave Fellman talks about grabbing customers when a competitor goes out of business, and Tom Crouser points out the perils of letting an employee disrespect an owner’s spouse who works in the business. Finally, John Stewart leads off talking about printing scams and then shares the wisdom of a printer who has successfully transitioned out of his business into a comfortable retirement.

That’s just in the printed edition. Additional content that will be available exclusively at www.quickprinting.com includes a roundup of CTP products available to the quick and small commercial printer and a discussion about what makes a digital press different from a digital copier/printer. Also, while the printed edition only comes out once a month, you can find daily news updates on our website and get weekly industry information in this e-newsletter.

At Quick Printing we are well aware that technology is changing our industry and we are committed to using technology to keep our readers up to date on these changes and on the best business practices necessary for success. There may be fewer pages today, but that doesn’t mean less information.

Most printers understand the importance of marketing, but it somehow seems to get put on the back burner as they deal with production issues, personnel crises, selling efforts and the like. With most of the capabilities necessary to mount an effective marketing campaign, printers too often put their own marketing efforts last—if they do any marketing at all. Part of the problem is that marketing usually does not have an immediate and measurable result. It takes lots of repetition and often it is difficult to directly connect sales increases to specific marketing efforts.

What is the difference between marketing and advertising? For the most part, advertising promotes a product while marketing promotes a brand. That’s not to say both can’t be accommodated in the same vehicle. Papa John’s latest ad campaign has a marketing message and a product offer. “Better ingredients, better pizza—Papa John’s” is the marketing message, while two one-topping pizzas for $12.99 is the product offer. That’s pretty straightforward.

However, Domino’s latest marketing campaign puzzles me. Basically, it says that the company has been listening to customer complaints that its sauce tastes like ketchup and its crust tastes like cardboard and they are going to do better. Better crust, better cheese, better sauce—at least, better than that stuff we’ve been pushing for the last several years. That is one bummer of a marketing message. “We’ll try not to suck as bad as we did before.” The product offer: If you still don’t like it, we’ll give you your money back—all of it.

I’d call that “mea culpa marketing” and have serious doubts that it will accomplish much except to remind people of the reason they switched to Papa John’s in the first place.

We long ago gave up on the wild New Years Eve parties. Actually, we’ve pretty much given up on wild parties in general (with a few notable exceptions such as the Print 09 bash the magazines threw last fall for our readers and advertisers). So, while the ball was dropping in Times Square, we were sitting quietly on the couch sipping brandy and scratching the cat.

There is something to be said for slowing down from time to time. The constant barrage of electronic communications and social and business obligations takes its toll. It is quite enough to simply stop and smell the flowers. We don’t have to take a picture, post it on Facebook, Tweet about it, or forward an account of the incident to everyone to whom we are LinkedIn. Fact is, that while all of our wonderful technology makes business and communication more efficient than ever, it can also contribute to stress.

As author Natalie Goldberg once observed: “Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.” How can we avoid getting stressed out about our increasingly hectic lives? Well, Tom Crouser suggests that we sort things into four categories—Urgent and Important, Important but Not Urgent, Urgent and Not Important, Not Urgent and Not Important—and then deal with them accordingly.

I also like the quotation from author James Carroll: “We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things [but] there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.”

Have a happy and prosperous New Year and remember to slow down from time to time. It’s good for you.