Reframe How You Look At Printing

I want to challenge you to reframe how you view the printing industry. Most of us view printing as an old school industrial/mechanical process whether it is cylinders or a head moving back and forth. I propose we view our industry as an information distribution business that is very much relevant and in-demand today in the information revolution.

I have been thinking about this for quite some time, ever since I read Focus by Al Ries. In his book he talks about the Honda Corporation. We think of them as a company that makes lawn mowers, generators, motorcycles, cars and even planes. Honda considers themselves to be in the engine business, not the transportation business. That really got me thinking about what business is and what business printers really are in.

As I look back at the many changes in the printing industry, from mechanical to photo-mechanical to digital, one thing struck me. We have transitioned into the information business and printing is very relevant today. Let’s take a quick look at where it all began and where we are today.?

Gutenberg was a purveyor of information. Around 1440, he invented the printing press. He could print about 3500 pages per day. With the printing press, he was able to distribute information to many people much faster than previously thought possible. With the invention of lithography around 1796 by Alois Senefelder which led to offset printing around 1904, production and distribution was faster and easier than ever. Information could be printed and distributed economically on a broad scale. Offset continued to be refined by larger and faster presses and the ability to use a photo-mechanical process to make the plates.?

Let’s review the process used to print up to the mid 1980s. The printing process was photo-mechanical. You had typesetting, paste ups, process camera, color separations, image assemblers, contact frames, platemaking and then the press.? If you wanted to make something big, you had to print in multiple sheets, and use a photographic process or hire a muralist to paint your design. Each process required skilled craftspeople, expense and time. You should have seen what it took to reproduce a catalog page. It was very cumbersome. The computer was about to cause disruption in the print industry and it all started with the personal computer. Images and type were about to be combined on a single page using a personal computer.

In 1982, John Warnoke and Charles Geschke started Adobe and invented Postscript, a page description computer language. Steve Jobs tried to buy Adobe but settled for a license of Postscript and a 19% stake in the company. In 1985 Apple would release the Apple Laserwriter that could image a page all at once, type and images. That was a huge breakthrough. By connecting Postscript to a typesetter made by Linotype, type and images could be output to paper or film. Typesetting, camera work and image assembly were no longer necessary. About this same time computer programs were becoming available for the Macintosh, Pagemaker, Illustrator, Ready Set Go, Freehand and Quark. Adobe continued to license fonts from type foundries and invented the type one font format. These were exciting times to say the least.

Concurrent to these developments, other companies were coming up with other solutions. Gerber came up with a mask cutter, Rachwal invented plate projection systems and there were page assemblers from Scitex and Crosfield. All of the systems dealt with part of the problem or were incredibly expensive. They didn’t deal with a page at a comprehensive level, i.e. fonts, type and graphics but the Apple computer did. Things were changing fast.

When movable type was invented, the unit of manipulation was the letter. Type was set one letter at a time, by hand. In the late 1880s, Ottmar Merganthaler invented the Linotype machine that was able to cast one line of type (hence the name)? instead of one letter at a time. Now the unit of measure was one line of type at a time. By the 1970s, hot metal was being replaced by cold type (a photographic process) as offset printing was taking over from letterpress. The change to offset started nearly 80 years earlier, but by the early 1970s most letterpresses had been phased out. Once type was set on a cold typesetter, the body copy was in galley format, or a long strip of type that with headlines needed to be pasted up. Now the unit of measure was the galley of type.?

With the advent of Postscript and Hewlett Packard’s HPGL, a competitor to Postscript, the unit of measure was now a page. Soon it was evident that a cross platform file format was needed to present the page on multiple platforms. At that time taking a page from a Mac to a PC was very problematic. There were font issues, cross platform program issues as most graphic programs run on Macs only. Adobe came up with a new file format, the pdf. I was fortunate enough to be at the unveiling of the pdf at a Seybold Conference. A file was displayed on a Mac and then a PC with no changes to the line breaks or integrity of the page. The page was made ubiquitous at this moment.

Something bigger was happening. Print moved at that moment from photo-mechanical to digital. Printers were forced kicking and screaming to the digital age. Soon customers were submitting jobs on disc. At this point in time we moved into the information age. We had to have BBS’s to take in work, servers, imagesetters, file storage, removable hard drives, scanners and software to remain competitive. We tried to tame the revolution into our world view but the customers were marching on. We could either try and keep up or lose clients. Then came Photoshop.

With Photoshop, clients could now manipulate their images. Before Photoshop and Color Studio by Letraset, image manipulation was either done manually by dot etching or with expensive consoles from Scitex and Crosfield. With Photoshop, we could turn a page into a bitmap, a jpeg or whatever file format Photoshop would allow us to save it as. We could change color spaces from RGB to CMYK or vice versa. The big aha from this evolution was something that has held true to this day. Technology migrates towards the end user, always.?

Printers were just starting to gain the equilibrium back when the internet was made accessible and viewable in graphic user interface, the web. The internet had been around for a long time, but was used mostly first by the military and then universities. Once that happened it was just a matter of time before it was used commercially to communicate. It was really limited by the bandwidth available at the time. We were at least 10 years away from wide acceptance of broadband that allows what we have today.?

If you are still with me and have taken that stroll down memory lane, let’s look at what it is that we print, mostly. Offset, digital and wide format printing is usually in one of these categories (I’m leaving out industrial):

Directional Signage

Collateral

Point of Purchase

Catalogs

Directories

Direct Response

Forms

Decor

Display

Books, periodicals

Note that there is a similarity to what we have online. Takeaway signage, decor and point of purchase and you have categories that are shared online. Some are emailed, some are funnels, direct response certainly exists online. My point is that we as printers already deliver some of the same content that our customers put online. Our direct response mailers have a headline that grabs your attention, a noteworthy image and compelling copy. You see, the media changes but the message usually doesn’t. There is of course some message to media tweaks and media to market decisions to make, but being a printer, you are delivering information for your clients. You are in the information business. Take a birds eye view of what services you actually provide.?

We all want to stay relevant in our market. We want to not be viewed as a commodity. We do that by offering products and services that are relevant to our clients. For example, you just printed an 8 page newsletter for a client and you are also mailing it for them. What else might they be doing with the content in the newsletter? Eblasts, social posts, Google My Business posts, blogs??

Reframe your business. You are a distributor of information via print. It is a short hop to be a distributor of information using other channels. Do you only keep your clients files for 90 days? Why? Don’t you think that would be a valuable service to offer? How hard is it to upload it to the cloud with a job number and share a link with your clients? That’s very valuable. Your client’s files are gold. Look at your client's needs from their perspective. Offer more services to them and repackage what you currently offer. Don’t get stuck in the status quo. Become a leader in your industry. You are already in the information business. Look at things from that perspective and adapt. View print in terms of information, not ink on paper or pvc. Think in terms of being in the information age, not the industrial age. You will open opportunities for you, your clients and your business. #printing #information #business #opportunities #leadership #positioning #branding #leadership #marketing #printmarketing