Graphic Communications: Print as a service
To illustrate print in the public effectively not as a “looser medium”, there’s an urgent need for action, which has to be supported by a superior perspective. The following aspects turn out to be critical:
1. Innovations are hardly demanded: The possibilities and the advantage of the newest cross media technologies are deficient or not known by the majority of printers and customers of the print industries (especially the advertising agencies).
2. Irrationality of the markets creates pressure: communication has to accept flexibly the incalculability of the markets and the Ad-hoc decisions combined with it.
3. Efficiency of the processes is king: It applies for communication projects of the companies: half as expensive, twice as effective! Print media as a marketing instrument have to accept this requirement.
4. The print industry doesn’t communicate respectively does it in a wrong way: A continuous Dialogue, which creates overvalue and additional benefit is missing between customer, agency, printer and print technology developer.
5. From the masses- to plentiful individual communication: new technical solutions will have to allow individualized communication in the print media branch. This can happen through variable data as well as through on-demand availability of classical print products (keyword: print portals)
6. Communication becomes interactive: In the cooperation “company-customers-advertisers-media houses” new, dialogue- and response- orientated information ways are formed.
7. Process optimization alone is not enough: service providers have to network and to learn thinking networked.
8. Reorientation – from print to service: printer and their technology-suppliers have to comprehend that their customers don’t have a “print problem” but a communication problem. The result is the unconditional necessity of Repositioning and consulting orientation of their core business printing matter production.
Advice and recommandation
If and how print will be able to stand its ground is therefore dependent from how the communication market recognizes and appreciates the values which are connected to the print today and in future times. As a medium print can also stand its ground in the digital age and in the knowledge community without a problem. But the old business models of publishers and printers, which see print only as a platform for advertising receipts or data duplication, do hardly have a chance any more.