Theatre company wins contest

Published
by
Chip
on November 19, 2008
in Growing your business and Marketing
. 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the economic crisis and announced PFL’s Economic Stimulus Contest. I don’t know why I was surprised, after all our customers are assertive go-getters, but we had almost 200 entries from customers across the country telling us their crisis-busting stories of how they are creatively marketing their businesses in these tough economic times. The winner of the contest for the month of October was a community theatre called the Cottage Theatre in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Their winning entry earned them $1000 in free printing from PrintingForLess.com. Following is their story:

As a community theatre, our organization tries to be as creative as possible when it comes to enticing new folks to purchase tickets to our productions. In a rough economy, being creative-at-a-bargain-price is even more essential. Our strategy is to wed our promotional tactics to the specific product (ie. play) we are selling. 

Here’s one recent example. This summer we produced a play called Harvey, a 1945 Pulitzer Prize winning drama that was made famous by Jimmy Stewart in a 1950 film by the same name. In the story, the lead character has an imaginary friend Harvey, who is a 6′1″ invisible rabbit. Harvey and his pal Elwood hop around the town, visiting local bars and businesses and making friends wherever they go. During much of the play, the rest of the characters are busy asking “Have you seen Harvey?” To market our show, we constructed three free-standing, wooden rabbit silhouettes (and affixed a play poster to each rabbit’s belly). We then sent an e-mail ad out to the local chamber of commerce members. The “Tall Rabbit Seeking Temporary Home” ad invited businesses to partner with us and display one of our 6′1″ Harvey silhouettes at their location for a couple of days. We went on to explain that we were expanding the drama of the play beyond our building and into the streets of our town. So, just like in the play, Harvey was spotted all over town, at banks, bakeries, video stores, bars, and even a local veterinarian’s office, never lingering in one place for more than 48 hours. We ran this promotion for three weeks, and we ended up having to turn down prospective business hosts, as we had such an overwhelming response to our simple e-mail invitation. When we picked up Harvey to move him to his next spot around town, he left behind a small bag of chocolate carrots as a thank-you present. . . . 

What was the result of all this? First of all, everyone in town had fun asking each other “Have you seen Harvey?” Secondly, we made a lot of new friends in the local business community. And thirdly, and most importantly, our production sold out! 

So our strategy for growing our business during a rough economy is to get creative and have fun! 

We were so excited about the stories and strategies used by our customers that PrintingForLess.com has decided to continue the contest in November and December. Enter the contest for your chance to win $1000 in free printing.

Offset Printing vs. Digital Printing

Published
by
Chip
on November 9, 2008
in Printing Methods and Printing Technology
. 1 Comment

I don’t know about you, but when I started getting familiar with printing and the printing industry I was under the impression that there was a hotly developing turf war a la West Side Story between offset printers and digital printers–offset printers, clearly the Sharks, with their old world technology and traditions up against the modern, new world attitudes and technology of the Jets. I imagined weekly rumbles with chains, switchblades, and other improvised weapons in the seediest areas of cities across America. And, because I work for a commercial offset lithographer, the Jets had their butts handed to them every week!

The truth of the matter is, and any good printer will tell you, that there is room in the world for both offset printing and digital printing. The reason is because they serve different markets and provide different printing solutions. 

Digital printing is the reproduction of digital images to a physical surface, like paper. The most basic form of digital printing is the office printer. You have the ability to easily produce several reproductions of the same digital image or print different images one right after the other. It’s highly customizable because of the ability to use variable data and lends itself to short print runs or print-on-demand (POD).

Offset printing is the process by which inked images are transferred from an aluminum plate to a rubber press blanket then “pressed” onto the printing surface. This process produces very high quality imagery and text. Offset printing is ideal for the mass production of identical pieces like catalogs and other marketing collateral.

As a consumer, your job is understand your printers’ sweet spot. The sweet spot is where the printer can produce your piece with consistent high quality at the lowest price possible. In other words, everybody wins. The printer loves to print your kind of job because it’s perfect for the equipment she has and it’s easy to make some money and you win because you’re going to get a great result and get it for a very good price.

A very important aspect to the sweet spot is the quantity you need. At low quantities, digital printing will be better because of the price. Offset printers have a lot of set up at the beginning that makes printing low quantities more expensive. However, as the quantity gets higher there is a point at which, depending on the equipment of the offset printer, the price per piece begins to plummet and offset printing is the better choice. One of the best questions to ask yourself is “what is this piece going to used for?” If it’s a date-sensitive piece, for example, and you only need a hundred, then digital is the way to go. If it’s a sales slick or spec sheet that you’ll hand out to everyone at a trade show and you need 1500 pieces, then offset printing is for you.

Quality is a whole other issue. Those stinkin’ Jets know they got nothin’ on what us Sharks can do.

Customer Service is a sound investment

Published
by
Chip
on October 28, 2008
in Customer Service and Growing your business
. 0 Comments

Last week I went to a workshop in Billings, MT featuring John DiJulius and his 10 Commandments of World Class Customer Service. As much as I would like to think that PFL does a great job in this area, the group I was with were pleasantly surprised to find out that we didn’t have all the answers and had something to learn. We had several take-aways that have turned in to action items in the areas of Service Recovery and Training and Development that should lead to an even better customer experience in the near future. I highly recommend John’s model and The DiJulius Group.

In my mind, especially when the economy is heading south, ensuring your customers have the best possible experience is a key survival tactic. Everybody is cutting back and the one way you can make sure your customers don’t jump ship is to provide a remarkable interaction that keeps you top of mind. More than the great goods and services you provide, it is the way the customer perceives her experience with you that will determine if she keeps coming back or not. And, once again, it comes back to very basic themes that we grew up with: fairness, honesty, trust, and integrity to name a few. Without these you can leave an interaction with a sour taste in your mouth.

Those themes cannot be developed without creating and maintaining a relationship with your customers. Even if you’re work is highly transactional, there are things that you can do to make it less so. Learning names, engaging your customers in conversation, and sincerely thanking them for their business are the no-brainers. There are tons of other ideas that can be used to guarantee a remarkable customer interaction and keep your customers coming back for more of what you have to offer.

No matter what segment of the business world you’re in, everybody is cutting back or renegotiating to save money. As John DiJulius and others have said, make price irrelevant by providing the kind of service that makes your customer think of no one else. In tough times, an investment in providing remarkable customer interactions is sound and may be a key factor to your survival.

Green Printing is a matter of trust

Published
by
Chip
on October 22, 2008
in Green Printing, Paper and Recycled Paper
. 0 Comments

Jackson’s comment from an earlier post brings up a good point. Who should you believe when it comes to all this chain-of-custody certification stuff? One thing that should be made clear is that, in my opinion, no responsible printer can claim to be totally green. The amount of power, water, and solvents needed just to keep the presses in good working order cancels out the concept of green printing. Since that’s the case, you have to look at a printer’s other operations, procedures, and supply chains. 

I can only speak to my experience as an employee of PrintingForLess.com. What I know to be true about us is that when it was time to build a new building we took a very holistic approach. Energy use, preserving sight lines (the mountains in my header can be seen from our deck), air quality in the building for the people and the paper, and what building and finishing materials to use. Everything was important to us so everything was considered in order to offset the fact that high quality commercial printing needs to use paper with virgin pulp in it.

The Forest Stewardship Council certification we possess allows us to confidently tell our customers that the choice of paper they use for their project is responsibly grown, harvested, processed, and printed on from tree to final marketing piece. If it’s important enough to our customers, but only after approval from our FSC representative, we are able to print the FSC logo on their marketing piece to indicate the choice they’ve made. It gives me the confidence that communities and ecologies from where the trees come from use sustainable practices and allow people to benefit from the work they do.

More to Jackson’s question, it looks to me, with only very little investigation, that the Sustainable Forestry Initiative maintains a North American focus while the FSC is very much internationally based. And, if you read their websites you can see that they aren’t handing out certifications like coasters at a pub. As far as lip service is concerned, you need to get back to basics and evaluate your relationship with your printer. Printing is a trust buy, especially if you’re working with an online printer. If you trust your printer to be responsive, responsible, and invested in your success, I would wager that you can trust them not give you any lip about sustainable practices.

Back to basics

Published
by
Chip
on October 13, 2008
in Business, Marketing and Small to Medium Businesses
. 0 Comments

Given recent developments, I would remiss if I didn’t lay down my thoughts on the current state of the economy. There is enough blame to go around, no matter where you fall within the political spectrum. The very real credit market connection between Wall Street and Main Street will affect Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). But the things we need to concentrate on, as owners of businesses and members of the middle class, are what we can control–not on rending our garments and gnashing our teeth about the things we cannot.

There are  very real factors that can weigh in on what we can and cannot control–most of which are subjects for other posts on other blogs. Socioeconomic, education, and social-justice issues are just a few. However, when we go back to basics and follow simple principles they usually don’t let us down.

Keep costs down. Renegotiate with your vendors. They might be going through tough times too, but one thing you can count on is that they don’t want to lose your business. Save when you can: Having cash on hand during a credit crisis for home or business will make it easier to pay for the things you need going forward.

Invest in your employees. Numerous studies have proven that it is always more expensive to hire a replacement for an employee than it is to invest in the good ones you have. In the end, the ROI will be increased productivity, increased loyalty, and happier customers. Do right by your customers. We’re all feeling the squeeze, but I would wager that even the squeezed-iest among us would still rather pay a little more for a great product at a fair price that comes with great service than a mediocre product at a cheap price that comes with terrible service. Any joker can lower his price; don’t fall into that trap.

Invest wisely in a marketing plan that has a proven track record for you. Maybe that means going after loyal customers with a call to action that will encourage them to spend more or seeking out new customers that you can wow and retain for the long haul. 

When it comes to facing down the downturn, getting back to basics is all about what you can control.

How are you handling the economic crisis? Or, in the words of the new contest that PFL recently announced, “What recession-busting marketing tactics will you use to ensure your business comes out on top?” Share your ideas in comments, or enter the contest.

Ask the best questions about paper

Published
by
Chip
on October 5, 2008
in Green Printing, Paper and Recycled Paper
. 0 Comments

You have a great-looking design. You have a call to action that is sure to draw them in. You have a well vetted mailing list. But you are concerned about the environment and want to do what you can to lessen your impact. What is a well-meaning business owner with a killer marketing concept to do? Ask the best questions.

This concept is not new to professional sales people. If you want to get the bottom of what is important to someone, ask open-ended questions designed to draw out the information you need. There is no rule that prevents customers from using the same technique. The printer is trying to sell to you … make sure what he’s selling, including his environmental practices, is something you want to buy.

Identifying the source and content of your printer’s house stock should be one of your goals. In my last post, I talked about Post Consumer Waste (PCW) and other definitions of recycled paper. PCW is great for paper towels and packaging but is not a long-term viable solution for quality commercial printing paper. You can only recycle something so much before it’s completely deteriorated. Find the viable middle ground that allows you to get the killer marketing piece you need manufactured with “light green” techniques and materials.

One industry standard that you can look to for guidance is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

The Forest Stewardship Council was created to change the dialogue about and the practice of sustainable forestry worldwide. This impressive goal has in many ways been achieved, yet there is more work to be done. FSC sets forth principles, criteria, and standards that span economic, social, and environmental concerns. The FSC standards represent the world’s strongest system for guiding forest management toward sustainable outcomes. Like the forestry profession itself, the FSC system includes stakeholders with a diverse array of perspectives on what represents a well-managed and sustainable forest. While the discussion continues, the FSC standards for forest management have now been applied in over 57 countries around the world.

Ask your printer where their paper comes from. Ask about its recycled content. Ask about what they do to lessen their environmental impact. If your printer doesn’t know about what he’s trying to sell you, how can you trust what they recommend when you reveal that your environmental impact is important to you?

Recycled paper: What does going green mean?

Published
by
Chip
on September 29, 2008
in Green Printing, Paper, Post Consumer Waste and Recycled Paper
. 3 Comments

The movement to go green in as many ways as possible is not a new notion. We recycle just about everything these days and for good reason. More often than not people find it odd not to be able to simply take their cans, plastic and paper to the curb anymore and have it magically taken off their hands (hint, hint Livingston City Council).  It would seem, then, that going green when you want something printed would be simple as well. Not so fast.

If you request that a printer use recycled paper for your project, do you know what that really means? Recycled paper, for example, is not the same as paper made from Post Consumer Waste (PCW). In the paper industry, recycled is the term used for paper pulp and scrap that is left over from the paper-making process that gets thrown back into the pulper in order to make more paper. Most commercial-grade paper usually has some recycled content in it. 

Paper with PCW content, as most people know, is made from paper that you and I send to the recycling center every week. The natural reaction is to request paper that is made of 100% PCW content. It is “true” recycled paper as most people understand it. However, there are two very important questions you need to ask yourself. Do you know what it takes to get the PCW paper back into printable material, and what is your budget?

The fact is, paper is probably the most important aspect of your printed piece. Its finish, brightness, and whiteness factors all contribute to the crispness and color of your final product. And although choosing a PCW paper is initially attractive for green reasons, the amount of chemical processing it takes to get PCW paper back to commercial-grade quality is staggering, and the process yields a very expensive product. And don’t forget, that chemical waste has to go somewhere afterwards.

In the end, you’re going to get a better-looking piece at a more reasonable price by going with a printer’s line of house paper stocks. Not all printers and house stocks are the same, as you can imagine. One can go  ”light green” if not green by asking the right questions. More on that next time.

Why is my blue, purple? RGB v. CMYK

Published
by
Chip
on September 23, 2008
in CMYK, Color Management and RGB
. 0 Comments

I remember the first time I encountered the term CMYK. I was probably 15 or 16 at the time and I was working with (I am so dating myself) MacPaint on my family’s Mac Plus. At the time I knew less than nothing about the printing industry, but I was fooling around with the color settings in MacPaint and saw Grayscale, RGB, and CMYK. I switched between the three to see what would happen, which, of course was nothing because the tiny screen was black and white anyway. One thing I did know, however, was that CMYK was mysterious and strange and therefore should be feared at all costs, so I switched the color settings to anything but that.

Certainly, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) and RGB (Red, Green & Blue) are nothing to be afraid of. They are just a color settings. But, if you’re a print buyer, designer, or jack-of-all-trades small business owner, it’s important to know what those color settings mean in relation to your printed piece.

I’m not going to explain the physics behind RGB and CMYK in this space. You can find great resources for that here and here. In a nutshell, the RGB color space incorporates all of the visible spectrum of light and therefore is very large. Millions of colors are available to choose from and display devices such as monitors and televisions use that spectrum. CMYK is a much smaller color gamut offering thousands of colors by comparison and is used for commercial offset lithography. You can think of the RGB color space in terms of a large circle and the CMYK color space as a much smaller circle within it.

Here’s the kicker. All pieces designed in the RGB color space must go through a RGB to CMYK conversion process to be printed on a press. It’s not hard to see that if you choose a color in RGB that does not exist in CMYK, when it comes time to get your file ready for the press, there might be a problem. 

One of the most common problems I see are solid RGB colors like bright blue converted into CMYK and turning purple. The device doing the converting, whether it’s Photoshop, Illustrator or even Publisher, is trying to come up with a solution for a color that doesn’t exist so it comes up with something it thinks is close.

Enough with the problems, how do we solve this thing? Well, one of the best things you can do is have a good consultative relationship with your printer. Have your printer provide you with a CMYK swatch book printed on the paper you’re going to use for your project. Choose colors for your logo or other design elements that fall easily within the CMYK color space. If you need to employ a designer, be sure to ask how much experience he or she has with designing for print compared to the web. Taking the time to educate yourself just a little bit about color will return your investment in peace of mind and great looking print.

What is reasonable to expect from your printer?

Published
by
admin
on August 11, 2008
in Customer Service
. 4 Comments

Anybody who knows just a little about commercial printing will tell you about the “mystique” it has. (And when I say mystique, it’s really a nice way of saying “lack of transparency and customer service.”) For such an old profession, the printing industry hasn’t evolved in the way it interacts with its customers.

Far be it from me to spout off platitudes. I’m not a highly paid customer service guru. But I know what I want when it comes to a service provider and I would venture to guess that most people do too. I want someone to be responsive to my needs, to treat me fairly, make my life easier, be an expert, and own up to their mistakes when they happen. That used to come with a handshake. Now we gird our loins for a fight as we dial the phone … that is if we get anyone on the phone at all.

So, what is reasonable to expect from your printer? I don’t think it’s at all outlandish to know, in advance, how much you’re going to pay for your project. I think it’s within expectations to know when you’re going to see a proof. I believe you should know when it’s going to arrive at your door and be able to change the production speed and shipping method if you need your finished product faster. And I believe you should receive exactly the kind of service you want from your printer. Online printer as vending machine? No problem. Need to have someone talk you through the entire process? You got it. In either case, you should expect to get someone on the phone immediately or to respond to your email within the same business day.

If all this sounds reasonable, then why doesn’t it happen regularly? Well, good service is not only hard to come by these days, it’s just plain hard. Giving good, thorough service is hard work. It takes vast amounts of dedication on the part of employees and careful training, clear values statements and trust from executives. It saves money to say no. It decreases staff expenses when humans don’t answer the phones. It’s easy to nickel and dime. What’s hard is developing a company culture in which employees—from front door to loading dock—genuinely care about their customers’ success.

I know a lot of people, including me, who have made it a point to buy from vendors who provide excellent customer service and high value while avoiding those that don’t. Personally, I just can’t be bothered. If you’re the same way and you’re still putting up with a printer who has that certain “mystique” … maybe you should ask yourself, why?