Change - Part 3

There are all sorts of diverse types of change. Some changes we choose for ourselves such as a career change, starting a family, starting to exercise. Then there is change that is forced upon us such as a career change, starting a family, starting to exercise.

One of my favorite stories that contains self-induced change, forced change and the resulting backlash, is about when the paper companies pushed print companies, end clients and the consumer to make the move to recycled papers. I tell this story to college students, and they are often shocked to hear my perspective, but I lived it, I was there, and this actually happened.

Our family business at its core was a printing business, I later built out the marketing practice, but this story is about the printing side of the business.

At the time, paper was quickly becoming a commodity and there was pressure on the paper companies to break this race to the bottom. There was so much paper supply, and it was mostly all great, in addition the influx of quality imported paper added increased pressure. Someone in the paper industry had the idea of pushing a relatively new product line of recycled paper that was made with higher amounts of post-consumer waste (side note, almost all paper is partially recycled as the mills reuse any waste during manufacturing – this waste is pre-consumer). This paper would create a unique offering which they could both charge more money for as well as create new unique offerings and break the spiral of having to sell a low-cost commodity. We were all for it, it was a win for everyone. We held educational seminars for clients, promoted how clients could stand out in their respective marketplaces, and it was good for the planet.

The problem was that the recycled paper was not good, and it fell apart in the printing presses causing all sorts of other problems, so printers largely rejected and sold against it.

That is until the paper companies went all in on their gamble – they were committed to this change. They went around the printers, direct to the print buyers of large corporations, explaining how buying recycled paper was the responsible thing to do. They also went to the consumer preaching green. Here is the funny part, the paper companies (yes, the paper companies) were pressing the consumer to save the trees, use recycled paper and even went as far as to push certification programs that we then had to buy into and use such as FSC.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the environment and reduce, reuse, and recycle. However, people also need to understand that trees are grown and harvested just like our food. The paper companies were not deforesting the US and leaving barren land to make calendars. Trees are a renewable resource. If the paper companies acted irresponsibly, they would eventually run out of their required raw material. The paper companies were not the bad guys in that respect.

This story is one of manufactured change that backfired on an entire industry to the point where a generation was raised on paper being bad and killing trees – the paper industry inadvertently hurt itself by decreasing demand. Add high speed internet, increased postage costs and a push by companies to save money by not printing and mailing for the sake of being green and well, a change to break out of a low-cost commodity spiral ended up eroding the demand for their product.

For our part – change was forced upon us and we pushed back – the change was pushed down on us harder by our end customers due to the paper companies going direct to our customers – we were forced to comply, and we did. We embraced printing on recycled papers, working with paper mills to create products that would actually work. We worked with our customers to find creative uses for this new speckled paper, and we helped our customers tell their story about how they were using paper responsibly.

This was a huge change, really globally, that impacted millions of people and careers that at the end of the day did have a positive impact and changed minds, just maybe not in the way it was intended.

Signed,

Change (Let’s get it done)