Peter Davidson, business and commercial director, explains why taking the long view is worth the wait when it comes to developing new demand for large-format products.
Over the past five years at Landor UK an active decision has been taken to focus on presenting the company’s solutions to what could be described as new markets - certainly for Landor!The creative design market is a good example, and to get in front of this audience we’ve this year exhibited at the likes of the annual 100% Design Show in London. The decision to do so has been quite an adventure, and we are still adjusting our marketing approach to match the culture of this and the other markets we are now investigating as potential growth sectors.
Every year we tweak our presentation to provide a fresh emphasis and this year, for the 100% Design Show, we collaborated with a photographer who combines his skill behind the lens with his graphic design background to produce spellbinding largeformat imagery. And it paid off, attracting show visitors wanting to know how the work had been produced.
This ‘new’ markets approach could easily be described as back selling, but it has the key advantage of directly reaching those Landor might not otherwise reach, allowing the company to engage with designers, architects, brand managers and marketing professionals. The key aim is to develop interest among end users in the materials and solutions we sell so that they specify them and the knock-on effect is that we sell more to our digital inkjet print customers.
And we’ve found that our approach is uncovering some really idea-hungry designers and specifiers who, in the majority of cases, are really unaware of the diverse range of materials and applications available to them through the use of digital inkjet wide-format technology.
The type of conversations we have at shows like this are more focussed on informing and educating the visitors, and are invariably longer and more in depth than we would have at typical print shows. But it’s worth it. We’re beginning to see one or two print companies themselves exhibiting at these ‘vertical market’ shows too and to my mind our efforts certainly compliment each other.
It should be said that exhibiting at shows like 100% Design has been a very different experience for us compared to our usual approach to the large-format and digital markets we have grown up with. The main difference is that the potential clients we speak to at the non-trade events have a very keen interest in knowing more about solutions and applications because they see new opportunities and ways to meet their own, and their customer’s, needs.
And then there’s the fact that you can open a conversation about possibilities not price!In fact price sometimes doesn’t even get discussed.
But make no mistake – this is no quick buck situation. This method of developing new customers and interest in large-format print requires patience, as the whole process is a long one. In the first few years we tried this tack we would walk away from a design show with a healthy volume of ‘enquiries’ and high short-term expectations, but for the first few weeks we would get very little feedback, either from the enquirers or from our follow up communication. But, in the following months we would get calls from inkjet printers, old and new, telling us that our products had been specified by their clients, even though they may have offered a cheaper alternative or have material they themselves would have preferred to have used for the jobs. It’s clear from this that our long game is getting results.
Of course this type of approach is no big secret to success that means we can ignore our more traditional routes to market, so we still attend print trade shows etc., but it is a real treat to get off that roundabout sometimes and see where it can pay to invest some time, money and effort in reaching a wider market. It helps us develop, our products and customers develop, and the large-format market as whole to develop.
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