Features

Martine Padilla, president of US-based printing strategy company Sophizio and director of the Sustainable Green Printing Partnership, shows how printers are now harnessing the power of their sustainability efforts. 

When sustainability is broadly defined as ‘global prosperity,’ encompassing fiscal, social and environmental responsibilities, the sustainability priorities of big brands vary -  usually driven by the impact of their own footprint. Goals for some companies include simple, passive initiatives such as ‘reduce, reuse, recycle,’ and for others it includes much better-defined goals including reduced waste, natural resource use reduction, emissions reduction, increased use of renewable energy, elevated labour practices and entire supply chain lifecycle analysis.

Peter Kiddell of the Fespa UK Association explains why it has set up an apprenticeship support structure – and how you could be entitled to a £1,500 grant.

Melony Rocque-Hewitt looks at Icon’s branding production and overlay solutions for the UN Conference on Climate Change.

Over here we’re all slightly jealous of Icon, the southeast London-based global event-branding group. The reason? Well, while the rest of us have been psychologically damaged by months of freezing temperatures, biblical rains, alleviated by the odd week of raging artic blizzards, members of the Icon team were packed off to Doha in the Middle East for three months to help oversee the branding production and overlay solution for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change.

In 1995, Columbia University professor Sheena Lyengar, one of the world’s leading experts on the art of choosing, conducted a famous study. She presented consumers with two supermarket tables: one with 24 types of jam and the other with just six. Her experiment showed that 60% of customers stopped by the table with 24 choices but only 3% made a purchase. Only 40% of shoppers stopped when presented with the smaller selection of jam but 30% of them made bought something. In an age when we’re constantly trying to give our customers an increasing array of options, sometimes less is more. As US company Cornerstone Print and Marketing has suggested in its blog (http://www.cornerstoneprintmarketing.com/about/news.html/article/2013/04/01/aim-to-own-a-single-idea-in-your-customer-s-mind), sometimes the most successful companies effectively own a phrase in their customers’ minds. When you think search engine, you almost subliminally think Google. The pertinent question this blog asks is: “What word or idea do you want to own in your customers’ minds?”

Wide-format print continues to attract entrepreneurs who want to launch their own businesses. Many of these new companies succeed. Many fail – and not always for the obvious reasons (eg cashflow, a tough market). Hilary Briggs, a profitable growth expert who has worked with many SMEs, has identified seven mistakes many entrepreneurs make (http://hilarybriggs.co.uk/resources/7-mistakes-people-kill-business/ ): doing too much themselves, not knowing what they don’t know, growing too fast before their model is proven to be successful, not having anyone to bounce ideas off or get disinterested feedback from, hiring the wrong people, lacking self-awareness and sticking in their comfort zone because they’re afraid to look ignorant, stupid or weak.

Anyone who has founded or run a business in this industry will, if they analyse that list honestly, admit they have committed at least one of those blunders. Briggs suggests it is especially common for founders of businesses to ignore the fact that not every employee is as passionate about the business as they are.

Nearly two years ago, Fespa’s Richard Kensett offered printers five useful tips for marketing themselves online ( http://www.fespa.com/news/blogs/guest-blogger/top-5-tips-to-cracking-content-marketing-for-your-print-business.html ). If anything, his thoughts are even more relevant today. In essence, he said print firms needed to be more creative online, ensure their brand was consistently expressed across all channels and offer personalised, useful content that is easy to share.

Sounds easy enough? So why aren’t more printers doing it? Too many think having a functional website and a Facebook page is enough. Yet how many likes has that Facebook page got? What’s the biggest discussion you’ve ever had on it? And how many of the people who ‘like’ you on Facebook actually interact with your company in any other way?

Content marketing sounds expensive, laborious and time-consuming. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. The ‘right’ content that gets you noticed can be something as straightforward as a photograph, some compelling words or even the right question? But if content marketing is to be done well, it has to be done often.

If you feel you’ve missed the boat, don’t worry; one of the great virtues of content marketing – especially when it comes to using social media – is that it is incredibly easy to catch up. Jeffery Hazlett, the author of ‘The Mirror Test’, says: “You don’t need some high-priced consultant to get started. Just remember the 4E’s: Engage, Educate, Excite, Evangelise.”

It’s a simple question but the answer is usually far from straightforward. Ron Ashkenas, a managing partner at Schaffer Consulting, estimates there are 83,000 books on Amazon about change management. That represents, in his view, 83,000 pieces of evidence that companies are failing to manage change – even though this issue has been discussed since the 1970s.

In his blog on Harvard Business Review (http://blogs.hbr.org/ashkenas/2013/04/change-management-needs-to-cha.html) Ashkenas suggests that companies fail because they often outsource management of change to ‘experts’ rather than encouraging managers to take the responsibility.

His advice to any company wondering why it is struggling to manage change is to ask three simple questions:

1. Do you have a common framework, language and set of tools for managing change? Obviously, if you don’t, you’re more than likely to be one of the 60-70% of firms that feel their change management effort has failed.

2. Is change management embedded into your project plans or run separately or in parallel? Again, embedded is better but it’s astonishing how many companies haven’t learned this.

3. Are managers or ‘experts’ accountable for change management? If the answer is experts, you’re in trouble. As Ashkenas concludes: “Making change management happen needs to be a core competence of managers, not something they can pass off to others.”

Image Reports speaks to Ken Green, director, A3M Designs.

Intimate knowledge and experience of inkjet development has allowed Fujifilm to understand the performance requirements needed for inkjet inks. 

There are many different stages in the life of a job, from the quotation through to final output, and its not always easy to link these together. But there is help at hand finds Nessan Cleary.

There is a tendency in wide-format to think in terms of individual machines and their capabilities but where there are multiple machines this can lead to a fragmented production department. The Image Reports’ annual Widthwise survey flags-up that, increasingly, PSPs are recognising that as a problem and looking at ways to improve their workflow.

Has this long-established annual event still got pulling power? Glimpse its attractions then make your mind up.

Are the oldies the goodies? When it comes to a show with a 26-year history, Sign and Digital UK event director Rudi Blackett believes this industry stalwart still has plenty to offer – and that 2013 will be proof positive of that.

Nessan Cleary investigates the UK entrance of this Memjet-powered wide-format printer.

Reprographic Technology International (RTI) has been showing off a new Memjet-powered wide-format printer, the Vortex 4200, which it is just about to start distributing in the UK. In truth, this is an existing model, the WideStar, first launched at the end of 2011. It’s been developed by the Hungarian company, Own-X, but has not been widely distributed across Europe, mainly because Own-X has concentrated on its label printer, which has sold fairly well. So it’s only now that the wide-format machine is being introduced to the UK market.