With the UK’s central government departments looking to reduce their CO2 emissions by 10% this year, printers may feel the need to join a network like ProcServe which has just gone into partnership with Planet Positive, the international environmental accreditation organisation, to reduce emissions in the supply chain and promote best ‘green’ practice.
The ProcServe network has 12,000 suppliers on its books and these kind of networks represent a significant opportunity for eco-savvy printers – a recent ProcServe/PlanetPositive survey found that 69% of companies weren’t even aware of the government’s new environmental standards.
Rita McGrath, professor of business studies at Columbia Business School, has identified one essential role at innovative companies: “Resource scavenger”. McGrath didn’t invent this idea, the great Tom Peters spotted this phenomenon at Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works factory and coined the term “skunks” to describe people who kept pushing a new idea even if they had no resources, no time and no interest from their bosses.
I’ve had a bit of a spend up over the last couple of months and software seems to be where my money has been going.
First on the list was a GMG colour server and smart profiler, the magic wand of colour management. For those of you not familiar with it, it removes the need for icc profiles on your Rip and by using the smart profiler with a spectrophotometer it enables you to make your own profiles that are specific to your printer and media.
Charles Bukowski was a misogynist alcoholic deadbeat who knew how to write a poem. In the movie of the cult American writer’s life, he wins a writer’s fellowship and is given a cubicle that eerily prefigures the white, antiseptic corporate prisons in Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon. Confined in his cubicle, Bukowski is given some blank sheets of paper and virtually told to write. Instead, he screws up balls of paper, throws them at the other fellowship winners and is escorted from the premises.
The pressure on costs has diffused the focus on the environment in many businesses. Yet regulators, legislators and publicly quoted companies are becoming more environmentally sensitive. The letter of intent between two industry bodies – DPDA and INGEDE – to investigate the deinking of inkjet printers is timely. Inkjet technology is just below the radar for pressure groups like Greenpeace but with volumes growing, that will change. The ability to take the inkjet print off paper and recycle it is crucial.
Vehicle wraps are most definitely in. It’s always dangerous to generalise about the tastes of young people –but the popularity of TV shows like Pimp My Ride is fuelling a boom in customisation that goes far beyond tinted windows, furry dice and ‘A Dog Is For Life’ stickers. Vehicle wraps aren’t just popular, they are – as a slew of research accumulated by Fespa shows – incredibly effective. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America reckons that one vehicle with a wrap can generate up to 50,000 ‘impressions’ a day in America while 3M research suggests that 70% of companies based buying decisions on the look of the suppliers’ cars.
We all have competitors who sell themselves by knocking us. If you’re looking for the perfect riposte, you could do worse than repeat the deal Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once offered the Republicans: “If they stop telling lies about me, I’ll stop telling the truth about them.”
Can printers make money out of the iPad? A print student at a recent exhibition asked Fespa’s blogger (http://blog.fespa.com/): “What part of the production chain would it work best in? And how would a printing app look.” The prospect of customers buying print through an iPad app is tantalising and terrifying. And yet apps, smart phones and tablets will change the way printers do business – and it’s up to printers and their suppliers to influence that change or not. Management information system suppliers have experimented with this technology. But, Fespa concludes, “nothing has come along and really made waves.”
Traditionally, print was sold by sharp-suited wide boys who couldn’t see beyond bonuses and their flash company car. Yet a growing band of printers prefer to sell through an online storefront, offering templates for posters, point of sale material and mechanisms for customers to submit jobs online. Early adopters, Fespa suggests, (http://blog.fespa.com/online-storefronts-the-future-for-print-marketing) believe they will take all their orders this way in future. It may be too soon to fire the sales force but the success of some storefronts suggests many printers need to shed their inhibitions about the internet – too many sites lack content and are rarely updated – or risk extinction.
A few weeks ago in Minneapolis, locals were perplexed by what looked like giant ovens in the shape of bus shelters on several street corners. The bus shelters made as larger-than-life ovens – they even had heating to keep queuing passengers warm – were no prank, they were created by an ad agency called Colle + McVoy and wide-format printer Pixel Werx (http://www.pixelwerx.net) and were the innovative highlight of a campaign to launch Caribou Coffee’s range of hot breakfast sandwiches. The shelter/oven was probably much appreciated in Minneapolis where the average temperature in January is -170C. Could something like this work in the UK?
Are family firms good for business? The eternal debate is especially relevant to print, an industry dominated by family–run small and medium sized companies. Sadly, recent research by Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John van Reenen for the Harvard Business Review (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/ family_firms_need_professional.html) suggests that family-run firms where the boss is a family member are even more badly managed than government-run businesses.
