The buzzword 'added-value' is bandied about so much these days that you could be forgiven for switching off to its meaning, seeing it as no more than a PR cliché. But with printers vying for fewer and fewer marcomms jobs, it has never been more important for them to add services to their portfolio that will give them the edge over the competition.

APS

APS is a marketing and communications solution provider with offices in Cheshire and Edinburgh. The Scottish team have a DPPAS (Design, Print, Publishing and Assorted Services) contract meaning APS is the default print manager and designer for the Scottish government. For jobs from the government’s collaborative partners however, the team must add value to compete for contracts.

"It could be easy for us to slip into a reactive mode with the DPPAS contract, as all Scottish government jobs automatically come to us. But we still have to compete for jobs from the government’s collaborative partners so it’s important that we are as proactive as possible. We do this by adding extra creative input, even if the client has an idea of what they want or if their brief is fairly rigid.

For the Scottish Housing Regulator’s (SHR) annual review, for example, we produced several different illustration options. Some fitted their brief exactly, of having silhouettes of people throughout the review, but we were aware that quite a few documents had used this aesthetic recently.

So we produced a ‘wildcard’ option by sending these silhouette illustrations to our laser cutters and then photographing them as a diorama. The result had much more depth, vibrancy and originality, and so the client was really pleased with it.

This is an example of how, even when presented with a fairly restrictive brief like the SHR review where we couldn’t change the format or colours of the piece, it’s still important to inject creativity into a project. We’re acting like a design agency within APS Group because a lot of companies who are also competing for the collaborative partners’ work are design agencies.

Even where we’re already guaranteed a contract it pays to go the extra mile. For instance, when we were asked to produce a Commonwealth Games Legacy report in preparation for the Commonwealth Games coming to Glasgow in 2014, we could have just produced a straight PDF as requested.  But as well as creating this, we decided to produce an interactive version for the general public, including a click book.

This was a test bed for us as we hadn’t dipped into interactive PDFs before. But since then we have been trusted with producing dynamic PDFs for other clients. This is an example of how our ethos, where we’re not just turning jobs around as easily as possible, brings in new and repeat business."

Mike Lynch creative client services director, APS Group

Augustus Martin

Augustus Martin designs and produces printed promotional material for retailers including both the largest retail grocery names, as well as smaller retailer groups and brands throughout the high street. One of the ways the company adds value is through its special ink effects.

"For many, adding a varnish or finish to a piece of print post-press is the only feasible way to increase perceived value of POS. But we think that adding value at such a late stage in the process doesn’t create a prominent piece of print – quality needs to begin from the outset.

Instead we use special-effect inks: ‘disruptive’ inks to increase the impact and standout of a printed item, ‘sensory’ inks to increase the time spent interacting with it, and ‘luxury’ inks to increase its perceived value above a piece of paper.

Disruptive inks were successfully used to create a ‘twinkling’ effect on a Tesco Finest Christmas POS campaign, which helped the range stand out during a saturated promotional period and saw sales rocket 10% to a three-year high. We also used this sort of effect to enhance Dorothy’s infamous shoes for invites to the opening night of Wizard of Oz the musical.

The list of our ‘sensory’ inks is significant and includes ‘high build’ and ‘fizz’ varnishes which are raised above the surface of the print and feel like embossing or Braille. We can also produce rubberised and stone finishes, which accurately reproduce the feel of these materials.

Our ‘luxury’ inks can be used to replicate a range of special finishes, from a matt or gloss car wax finish through to a pumice stone finish. We also offer ‘liquid silver’ and ‘liquid gold’ highly reflective mirrored metallic inks, which can be used as a base that allows standard four-colour images to appear metallic. These metallic inks give a finish equivalent to foil which is not replicable with litho or standard screen silvers.

Many of these special effects can’t be created using foiling and embossing – some of our inks produce a piece of print that would be unachievable by post-press finishes. When advertisers choose our inks rather than a post-press finish it is because our special effects allow them to achieve the ultimate goal in retail communications – commanding consumer behaviour."

Daniel Pattison group sales director, Augustus Martin

Fulmar Colour

Fulmar Colour has been printing commercial and corporate print, point-of-sale, marketing materials and colour hardback books for three decades. It adds value with an in-house ink lab.

"At Fulmar Colour, we pride ourselves on being one of the few printers with our own in-house ink mixing facility. The lab, managed by Flint Group and with its own ink lab technician, enables us to do a range of experimentation on materials and substrates to cater for a client’s precise demands.

One of the most popular uses of this facility is colour-matching inks. We’ve colour-matched chocolate bars, fruit and fabrics in the past. One client wanted corporate stationery with an aubergine colour on it so we had to develop a new shade for this as we couldn’t find a Pantone close enough. I can think of two or three major accounts where having this capability has played a major part in bringing in their business.

The ink facility was also instrumental in working with another client, not for colour matching, but for developing a light-fast ink. We were working with a company who needed bright and luminous health and safety stickers to go on scaffolding. Normally inks are very prone to fading but obviously it’s critical in this instance that these colours don’t fade and the safety stickers continue to attract the attention of workers.

We’ve also developed specific laminates and varnishes for clients who require a particularly slick finish – automotive and cosmetic brands for example. We can then offer these new finishes to other clients. We’ve also added-value to cosmetic companies’ materials through scented inks: a popular finish is a varnish that releases a scent when it comes into contact with the warmth of someone’s hand as they take a piece of mail out of an envelope.

It can take three to four months to develop a special ink or varnish, as the light-fast inks for the scaffolding project did, but this is very worthwhile. It breaks the dreaded cycle of having to sell print as cheaply as possible."

Mike Austin sales and marketing director, Fulmar Colour