Print is dead. Long live print.

Over the last year, I have come to refer to COVID-19 as the great disruptor. The global pandemic has disrupted lives, economies, sectors, industries and businesses. And certainly one industry that has been hugely affected has been the print industry.?

Many businesses, including financial services, were already rapidly transitioning to digital-only methods of internal and external communication and COVID-19 and the resulting move to working from home accelerated this trend.

Do you really need to spend all that money printing glossy brochures when you can reach your target audience more easily via digital channels and leverage the power of video communication for greater impact? And, with staff working from home and sending emails and PDFs back and forth, are office printers really necessary?

The digital champions and evangelists out there have been pretty adamant. COVID-19 has put the final nail in the coffin for the print industry. Digital reigns supreme.

I beg to differ.

The missing link

As a creative communicator, I love digital. I love the way I can use not just design and the written word but also video, animation and audio. Digital allows me to create a deeper, more layered communication for my target audience. And it allows them to interact with my message so that I can learn more about them and how they react to what I’m trying to convey.

Marketers love digital because it gives them data. Data they can bring to the C-suite and say, “Look! This works!”?

Procurement loves digital communication because it significantly reduces paper, toner and printing costs.?

But despite the benefits it provides, digital only communication lacks something quite critical:?physicality.

Digital, for all that it can combine words, images, video and audio to create extra layers of communication, leverages only our ability to see and hear. And so, for all the clicking, swiping, dragging and dropping that you can do on a touch screen, the sensory experience itself is rather?flat.

Human beings are multisensory creatures. We are constantly using all our senses to engage with our environment and each other. We don’t just absorb information through our eyes and ears. Our sense of touch, taste and smell are important factors too.?

The more senses a piece of communication engages, the more impactful and memorable our communication will be. And that’s what print can bring to the table.

The power of print

I love bookshops and libraries. For me, there is something magical about these places and I instantly feel at home the moment I step inside. The sight of all those books stacked and filed so neatly, the mosaic effect of so many different covers side by side, aisle after aisle filled with words, stories and knowledge... And then of course there is the smell... the aroma of paper and ink is endlessly evocative for me. Digital books stored on a phone, tablet or Kindle just don’t have the same impact.

So, let’s look at some practical applications for print.

Consider a marketing brochure. Just like its digital counterpart, you can play with the design, the images and the typography to convey the impression you want. But with a printed brochure you can go several steps further because now you can engage with your target audience’s sense of touch.

Think about the quality, weight and type of the paper stock you use. It’s texture and inherent colour and grain. Think of how you can add embossing and debossing effects. Play with finishes, varnishes and printed textures. Or use metallic colours and holographic imagery.?

Even the weight of your brochure can make its own impression. Hardcover? Added dust jacket? Perfect bound or saddle stitched? All of these choices tell the reader something about your brand that goes beyond words and pictures. You can even use scented printing to engage your target audience’s sense of smell.

Is a PDF sent by email or downloaded from a website really going to have the same impact?

What about direct marketing? Let me start to answer that question with another question. When was the last time you fully read an email from a colleague or even your manager? I don’t mean glanced at, got the gist of, scanned through or whatever. I mean fully read through and considered every part of the email? Probably very rarely. To be fair, the average office worker receives about 121 emails everyday?and, if you are a decision maker in your organisation, that number will be far higher. So naturally, subconsciously or perhaps very consciously, you’ll pick and choose those emails that you really want or need to read. Now imagine receiving an unsolicited email from somebody outside your organisation. Even if it manages to get past your spam filter, will you bother to open it or simply just delete it?

For marketers, sending an electronic direct mail (EDM) is a no brainer. It’s easy and very cheap. But, bearing in mind what I’ve described above, how effective are those easy and cheap EDMs? According to an article in Forbes,?“In its response rate report, the?Direct Marketing Association (DMA) analysed?Bizo and Epsilon data and found that?direct mail achieves a 4.4% response rate, compared to 0.12% for email. Overall, the DMA found that direct mail’s response rates are actually anywhere from 10 to 30 times higher than that of digital. It notes that consumers, overwhelmed by inboxes cluttered with unsolicited marketing emails, are more receptive to direct mail, which arrives on a much less-cluttered channel.”

Imagine instead a limited print run of an interesting, attention grabbing physical direct mail piece, personalised for the intended recipient. How much more noticed and therefore effective would that be? It would undoubtedly more expensive to produce and send than an EDM, but it would also likely be far more effective.?

And the good news is, producing that limited edition direct mail piece may not be as expensive as you think with the digital printing and personalisation technology many commercial printers utilise today.

Something else to ponder: Digital text might easier and cheaper to distribute, leading to people questioning the need for printers of any kind in the office. But, and it’s a big but, it has been shown that paper-based reading yields better comprehension outcomes than digital-based reading. In fact, the same study, which examined research in this area from 2000 to 2017, showed that the advantage of paper-based reading actually?increased?over the years since 2000. So, cutting back on printers in your office may save you on printing costs but what is it costing you in terms of information clearly communicated and understood?

Now I am not advocating that we abandon digital and return to potato printing on papyrus. Far from it. What I am arguing for is a more nuanced approach to deciding when to use digital, when to use print, and more tantalisingly, finding ways to combine them for a seamless, more powerful experience for your audience.?

Integrating digital into print

Digital is an integral part of our everyday lives. But these lives are lived in a physical world. So it makes no sense to split the digital and the physical when they can be very powerfully integrated. And Augmented Reality (AR) can be an integral part of this.

According to Grand View Research, the global AR market size was valued at USD 17.67 billion in 2020. It is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 43.8% from 2021 to 2028. Apple has incorporated AR into the iPhone and iPad and?says there are already 10,000 AR-enabled iOS apps from 7,000 developers, with many focused on shopping or home improvement as a way to practically use AR at home.

This is where some fascinating possibilities arrive for print. Where can those ‘triggers’ for AR experiences be hosted? Well, printed material including brochures and packaging seem like the perfect place. In fact, a number of brands have already made moves into this space including?19 Crimes & Living Wine Labels, where they use AR to bring their wine labels almost literally to life.?

So, imagine incorporating this technology into printed property brochures where an image triggers your phone or tablet to take you on an AR tour of the project, complete with fly throughs and videos of the show flats. Or food packaging that triggers a video showing you how to prepare different recipes. Or an instruction manual that uses AR to show you how to put that blasted table together and not have a worrying amount of leftover screws and dowels when finished. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

While businesses and marketers are under tremendous pressure to drive down costs and enhance productivity, deciding to use digital or print should never be an “either-or” choice. By taking a carefully nuanced approach that combines both, you can get the best of both worlds, engaging your audience where their minds roam (digital) and where they live (physical).?