Features

Seeing is believing, which is why this Wiltshire company is creating a shop window for its experimental wide-format retail applications.

Can you sell your sustainability USP as a printer?

That’s the question Image Reports posed at its EcoPrint debate. Here’s how the panel’s international spread of print experts see it…

The skies the limit when it comes to wide-format digital printing. So, as the countdown to Christmas begins, Melony Rocque-Hewitt looks at some of the niche products that have caught the imagination of the public.

Not so long ago, I was having lunch with a sales director of a London-based, wide-format, digital printing company who told me that when he went to see clients, one of his party tricks was to take an empty portfolio with him to demonstrate the ‘no limits’ characteristics of wide-format digital print. 

Pixartprinting is one of the biggest Web-to-print companies in Europe for professional customers. Figures for 2011 show a turnover of 32m Euro and a customer–base of over 80,000. The company, founded in 1994 by Matteo Rigamonti, has seen a year-on-year growth and last year it managed a staggering 40% jump. The expected rise in 2012 is not quite of that magnitude but turnover is still expected to reach 40m Euro as the company continues to expand at a phenomenal rate. But in the UK it’s not making the mark it wants to. So here I ask Matteo about the company’s expansion plans, including its wide-format ambitions, and its intentions for the UK market.

Are you on Flickr, Twitter or YouTube? Octink, the London wide-format printer which has twice been listed as one of the Sunday Times’s Best Green companies, certainly is. There’s a nice environmentally sound poster on Flickr, a tweet about a new director and eight videos on YouTube (none of which, it has to be said, have become a viral sensation).

In a small way, Octink is participating in a revolution which David Armano, a senior vice-president at communications agency Edelmann, calls the cult of influence (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/01/the_six_pillars_of_the_new_inf.html). Armano urges companies to use digital tools to increase their reach, get closer to customers, seem more relevant, build credibility in a community of influence and become more trusted. These are not small goals but collectively they can help you engage with the people you want to influence – be they customers or opinion-formers – to help your business.

It’s easy to lose sight of the over-arching goal when you’re struggling to know what to tweet – or think you’re too busy to bother – but it could help you reposition your company. One of the problems printers have marketing themselves is that they don’t have the budget to sustain a big brand-enhancing campaign. But if they reach out to the right niches, they might be rewarded with new business.

In Simon Raven’s novel ‘Alms For Oblivion’, one character says of another: “He’s never seen anything he doesn’t want to see in his life.” We can all be like that – no matter how observant or open-minded we like to think we are.

But Rock LaManna says, in a Fespa blog with the exaggerated title of ‘The Two-Part Process For Unstoppable Growth’ that strategic growth often starts with a reality check by seeing what their team think. “The most successful CEOs are not always the ones who are most knowledgeable or decisive,” says LaManna. “They are often the leaders who create the best teams, inspire peers and set a coherent vision to align the team’s mission.”

Once you look at the business as a team, he suggests that growth can come from some prosaic sources, such as a decision to focus on – and generate added value from – your big accounts. This might sound obvious but many of the options he recommends – aligning yourself with key suppliers, creating a joint venture or developing a new market – might make more difference to the bottom line than half-baked reorganisations, a fancy new website or a new mission statement.

If you’ve got mission statements on your mind, tale some advice from an expert like the Orion Consultancy (http://www.orion-consultancy.com/1/post/2012/08/mission-vision-values-and-strategy-how-to-untangle-them.html/). They recommend that every quest to redefine your mission statement should start with one question: “Why do we exist?”

An easy question to ask, but can you succinctly answer it?

The first step in the journey of innovation is usually said to be a brainstorm. But is it? As Jeffrey Baumgartner says in his newsletter ‘Report 103’ (http://www.jpb.com/report103/index.php) many of these sessions generate “best ideas” that look good but are pretty safe.

Take the rise of digital cameras. The first prototypes produced very low quality images and, Baumgartner notes,  “If people in the film industry were asked ten years ago, which is better – improved film or digital images, they would have said “improved film”.” And they would, of course, have been wrong. Breakthrough ideas, he says, “cannot be directly compared to existing notions”. And it is these ideas – from the Model T Ford to the iPod – that transform their company’s performance.

The other drawback, Baumgartner suggests, is that brainstorming sessions can generate so many ideas it is hard to decide which ones to pursue. In an approach Baumgartner calls “anti-conventional thinking”, he proposes that companies focus on one really big idea and, by questioning, debating, criticising and improving that proposal, develop it in such detail that the “meeting can produce a step-by-step action plan, defining what needs to be done to implement the idea”.

Sounds simple – when it obviously isn’t. But this, Baumgartner suggests, is what scientists do. They gather a lot of information, formulate a single thesis and test it. If that doesn’t work, they revise that hypothesis and try again.

This process is obviously more unpredictable – and may seem initially more costly and time-consuming – but it might generate the big idea that drives your revenue up.

We live in an age that worships speed – of communication, decision-making, and 100 metre-running. Yet there is a case to be made that speed isn’t always good for companies. A recent, rather arcane study by John Hopkins University assistant professor Brian Gunia (http://briangunia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Gunia-et-al-2012.pdf ) found that managers who made decisions slowly were more likely to make ethical decisions. Many of the dodgy calls that helped precipitate the global economic crisis were made at ridiculous speed.

And in a new book Wait: The Art Of Science And Delay, Frank Partnoy (http://frankpartnoy.com) suggests that in creative industries, the constant pressure to make decisions quickly actually prevents the kind of insight that really transforms performance. A fan once asked Ernest Hemingway how he wrote a novel. “The first thing to do,” said the author of A Farewell To Arms, “is to clean the fridge”.

With Ecoprint, the conference and exhibition devoted to sustainable printing, being launched in Berlin (http://www.ecoprintshow.com), this is an opportune moment to consider the plight of the St Lucia parrot.

In 1977, this particular parrot was on the verge of extinction. Commissioned by the government to save the species, conservationist Paul Butler tried to establish a sanctuary for the bird – and impose tough penalties on those disturbing it. All he lacked was public support. So he created a parrot mascot, Jacquot, printed T-shirts, persuaded hotels to support the campaign with stickers and even convinced a local band to record a song about the mascot.

By making the parrot a symbol of national pride, he created a groundswell of support for the sanctuary. Today, there are 1,700 St Lucia parrots in this West Indies island state. That success was the inspiration for an organisation called Rare (http://rareconservation.org) which builds on such bright spots to change behaviours to protect the environment across the world. Near Dongting Lake in central China, Rare has even run a billboard campaign to encourage locals to report sightings of the endangered finless porpoise.

Rare’s credo is simple. Build on what’s good, replicate it as rapidly as possible and recognise that the most effective way to alter human behaviour is to empower the people whose habits you are trying to change.

There’s a lesson in there for every company striving to become more sustainable.

Print has had to reinvent itself more times than Madonna to stay relevant. (And let’s be honest, it’s looking a tad more relevant today than dear old Madge.) Could this be the year that one particular reinvention, lenticular printing, takes off?

FESPA certainly seems to think so (http://www.fespa.com/news/blogs/printers-go-3d-with-lenticular-printing.html), calling on printers to embrace this method, which gives flat images depth and motion, and unleash such effects as 3-D, flip, morph, zoom and animation to make their customers’ posters, outdoor advertising, packaging and promotional materials even more compelling.

Prolific design expert Karim Rashid is exhibiting some of his own extraordinary lenticular images at New York gallery Gering & Lopez. For those of you who feel they can’t justify a jaunt to the Big Apple in this age of new austerity, Core 77 have been kind enough to show a sample (http://www.core77.com/blog/exhibitions/lenticular_images_by_karim_rashid_20_x_12_exhibition_at_gering_lopez_in_nyc_23448.asp) which even as stills suggest the vast possibilities ahead.

The ultimate proof of the power of lenticular printing would be if the technology could bring some depth to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Printing to fabrics for soft signage, or even deckchairs, is potentially one of the biggest growth areas – providing you can make the initial investment. 

Nessan Cleary finds out why this cutter, though it’s been around a while, is just being introduced to the UK wide-format market.

Next to a printer, one of the most important pieces of equipment is a cutting table and there's an ever growing choice. This month we've been looking at the Mastercut 2200 from Blackman and White, which has been around for a while but is only just being launched into the wide-format sector.