One of the first lessons of communication is that what one hears isn't necessarily what is being said. Getting messages across in a noisy and chaotic media landscape is harder than ever because of the proliferation of channels, analogue and digital. Consumers are bombarded to the point of numbness, as Bruce Springsteen has pointed out: 57 channels and nothing on. Marketers call it cross-media, as if it were something new. But consumers have always benefited from cross-media communications.
Printed billboards, newspapers and magazines, and direct mail echo television ads: print promotes television and radio as well as film and printed media. Entertainment listings titles The Radio Times, TV Choice and What's On TV are regularly amongst the UK's top ten best selling printed magazine. What has changed is the number of media channels we must negotiate and, crucially, the channel independence of digital content. Marshall McLuhan said in 1964 that 'the medium is the message', but messages are no longer tied to a single medium.
Today's cross-media adds a digital dimension, but the basic model hasn't changed. Media communications are still about repeating messages across multiple channels to reinforce them and drive response. Campaigns that put print at their heart give printers a base from which to bid for additional business, but that may be easier said than done. If printers want to extend their businesses to include additional media services there is no shortage of digital technology, from websites to AR to automated text messaging. Far harder is for printers to change their culture and invest in people who understand new media as well as old.
Plenty of printers have stepped up. For instance, Chesapeake, one of the world's largest packaging printers, provides dedicated customer web portals to make it easier for its customers to order their print online. This model has traction in many parts of the printing industry, especially with digital printers. Chesapeake is taking an even more ambitious route, providing customers with access to colour management, workflow and communications services using X-Rite's PantoneLive. This is a cloud-based communications system that ensures brand colours are accurate wherever they are viewed. It adds a new dimension to Chesapeake's services, giving it an advantage over competitors for the next couple of years.
Most printers, however, are much, much smaller than Chesapeake, running just the one factory rather than 45. For these printers to turn themselves into marketing services providers requires more than an owner's vision and a technological leap. Adding web technology extends a pre-press workflow to the web, but going beyond that takes a printer into the realms of content and channel management. If a printing company wants to add social media services to their offerings, someone has to be hired who can put a strategy behind online communications, plus manage tweeting and all the associated content and processes. If you are struggling to see the point of a Facebook page for your business, imagine how difficult it will be to sell social media services alongside print to customers! The 'how' part of this problem isn't hard, but the 'why' part can be extremely hard. It depends on how able a printing company is to expand its known reality, and on appreciating the needs of individual clients.
The secret is to understand where conventional print media overlaps with digital interactions, and where the leverage is. There should obviously be an advantage in pairing short-run digital, bespoke and variable data print with email campaigns or web content. This is the type of content that generally lends itself to cross media marketing. Attitude Clothing is a great example here: the company produces print catalogues promoted via email, direct mail and text messages to existing customers. The product is gothic clothing for teenagers (one hopes) and the promotions nuanced and clever, using multiple channels and reinforcing them.
Wide-format printers have received this message and many have regular email campaigns for special offers on banners and posters. Once they get the hang of customer profiling and data management, they might even be able to offer posters for special birthdays and similar occasions. Photobook printers such as CeWe already have this down, too.
There is no question that printers should expand their activities to include web services for their clients, on the basis of existing digital workflows. But how far they go beyond this depends on the people they can hire, train in multichannel production and hang onto. This is the biggest barrier to developing a marketing services business on the back of printing.