Know-How-Box
Live and Let Die: Print Communication in Change
„Everyone talks about the weather. We don’t.“ Nowadays we should transform this legendary advertising slogan of the German railway company Deutsche Bahn like this: “Nobody wants to talk about print. We do!” – Because even if established business models fail with print, print as a medium can only win.
Andreas Weber, Mainz/Germany, 20. Februar 2009
By Andreas Weber, Mainz/GermanyThe communication market lies in change. Service providers of the print industry, media houses and agencies have to reorientate themselves in the dialogue between companies and their customers. Interactive marketing becomes an ultimate discipline. Dialogue-orientated communication and data transfers are required. That means for all parties to become more flexible, to find efficient solutions and to arrange a permanent improvement of established communication processes. The print branch, which sales about 900 billion Euro worldwide, is most strongly affected. That’s because today and in the future printer - as consultants of advertisers- have to be able to sell actively a new service and to transport the customer value in the scenario of interactive marketing strategies.
If you believe in the new basic knowledge of marketing, the relationship network between companies, consumers, advertisers and media houses will change in a dramatic way: companies and consumers act through the internet and digital technologies technically on the same level and without media break. The consequence: Dialogue-orientated, digital communication shortens the ways. Response can be assimilated “on the fly” to optimize campaigns or products and to respond individually to customer wishes. Advertising agencies will either be only suppliers of ideas or have to learn, to establish a relationship management not only punctual but mass-market. This is in the usual way of assignment and accomplishment of single campaigns hardly possible any more.
Digitalization and networking turn media production upside down
The digitalization of communication allows a networking of supply and demand. Partnerships and cooperation become indispensable. Print media get an ambitious importance through the digital technology in the marketing-mix – they transport dynamic, not only static contents. Digital print productions (and not only digital printing!) create synergies between the individualized print on paper and pinpoint offers of online-media. Consequence: transactions are prepared much more efficient. At the same time the classic print technologies achieve an appreciation: a better and more stable quality is possible through software control and digital measurement, as well as the drastic reduction of changeover time. And with it the edition dimensions, which are profitable to produce, drop more and more. An enormous advantage arises, if so-called on-demand-productions are used over print portals. Web and print are making a symbiosis concerning the controlling and fabrication of print.
Although the communication branch has realised the technical advantages of the new print technologies, but it cannot use it satisfactory. The reason: The technology developer and –solution provider as well as their customers, the printer, are till now hardly able to communicate the advantages of new production methods and the customer value in a comprehensible way.
On the same time the value of the printed information has to become – especially in the competition with electronic media – clearer, to avoid serious disadvantages. Although the print industry is – as technology-dependent innovation branch - adept in crises because of many structural changes, it has never been in front of such massive cuts like today:
1. The advertising branch (which finances over 80 percent directly or indirectly the printing matter production) is fighting with dramatic retracements of advertising budgets, with media-spending print advertising looses especially in newspapers and magazines with a double-digit percentage.
2. At the same time a massive shifting of communication budgets is imminent, because the capital should be invested in CRM-projects, e-mail-, mobile- and online-marketing for example instead of printing matters.
3. The German Federal Association of Print and Media (BVDM) determines from quarter to quarter an atmosphere index which is becoming worse. It comes along that the print branch is with usual mass-print productions with an over capacity of around 30 percent according to estimations.
4. Since the year 2000 the forecast of the leading media company Time Warner, that the contingent of print media at the media use will break in about one third until 2015 (decline of 16 % in the year 1995 to 11 % in the year 2015), comes true.
5. The investments in print machines stand on a historical low level.
The following question sounds: Does this dark atmosphere image agree with the existing possibilities, so the factual manageable?
The problem: constant greed for more
The drafted picture shows: The atmosphere is bad and improvement is hardly in sight. Both on the publishing side and on the side of the service providers from the print industry. But it has to be questioned: Is this up to the print medium per se or to inherited business models and strategies of market partners, which are based on a maximization of advertising receipts/expenditures on agency- and publishing- side?
A fact is the extremely high dependence of the print media on the advertising market. That’s because publishers make 60 to 80 percent of their sales volume out of advertising receipts and are consumed by the danger of monoculture. Also beside the publishing branch printing matters are predominantly financed directly or indirectly by advertising. But fact is also: today print media offer best quality, which was not achievable before. The developments of print technology reside on the highest standard – and profit by digital technology. She allows creating never known rationalization- and cost saving-potentials at the print media production.
A secondary effect, which was until now considered only in an inadequate way on the communication market, shows highest burden: the imbalance of receipts and expenditures. On the opposite of the - over the years (at least until the crash in the years 2001/2002) double-digit risen - advertising costs of the industry stands a weaker common market growth in the single-digit area. This imbalance is one of the major reasons that advertisers deal more cautious with communication expenditures and especially media-spending. The high advertising expenditures can hardly be justified in front of the controlling, which is now shown very clearly in the financial crisis 2008/2009. Furthermore the media and agency partners owe the answer, which value advertising can have in and with print media respectively which factual effectiveness is given with the achievement of communication targets for the customer. It is not enough any more to show the pure coverage in certain target groups/segments. And to be honest: the breezy long-winded reasons of the “print is effective”-campaign of the German Association of Magazine Publishers (VDZ) are not able to cause that emotional and rational. That’s because the campaign is based on a fundamental error in reasoning, because print media in their effect are reduced on pictures, which can be assigned by every other media channel as well. Result: It is not observable that print is effective, but only that branding is effective. And that we know either way.
Important: To position print media in the right way
The crises of business models in the print branch belie the versatile possibilities, which are accomplished by print media and print technologies in the networking of communication elements:
- The innovative companies of web economy (before all others Ebay, Amazon & Co) as well as brand producers of all shade use print media not only as an image medium but especially for active brand- and product communication (which is documented by the GWA Production Award in an excellent way for years).
- print is motor of a quickly developing corporate publishing-category, which grows constantly for over 10 years.
- print is an important platform of the finance- and economy- communication especially through the so called transpromo (bills, account statements or special information, which contain customer specific data and are accumulated with advertising information).
- print escapes the fleetingness of the world of data and creates credibility through surface feel and immutability.
- print technology takes the lead-function. Marketing activities can be boosted in their effectiveness in a significant way on the basis of digitalization in connection with the internet
- print media guarantee in the brand dialogue through the supply of printed information that consumers can experience brands penetrative and sustainable.
That’s why print media don’t have to hide concerning their functionality and benefit. But they are dependent in their importance on the relevance of contents and new quality parameters, which are not only defined by beautiful print pictures any more. But condition for the print is a reasonable lobby- and communication work, which is matched to the facts and which has to be effective in the broad public as well as among communication professionals. 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 print media technologies are deficient or not known by the 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 efficient! 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.
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.
The new ‘old’ values of print
Language is our most important communication instrument. Communication needs media as means of transport. The technical media (typically embodied by the book) followed the personal media (represented by the human). This quantum jump needed millenniums to develop the required cultural techniques which were necessary therefore. Signs and picture elements, from which characters developed as a complex codification of human expressiveness, moved to the center.
The actual beginning of life is made by the script (Heraklit). Script is visualized language (Otl Aicher). The leading medium of the Gutenberg galaxy is the typographically script (Marshal McLuhan). The paper is its ideal medium. Printed paper allows duplicating ideas and cogitations in the form of text supplemented by pictures, colours and illustrations. The democratization of the knowledge of the world through the printing lead to a refinement and perfection of our communication possibilities: Beside the books came flyer, posters, newspapers, magazines, brochures – in short jobbing in unbelievable diversity.
Printed paper in the form of printing matters sparked a cultural bloom, which created the nutrient medium for the medium- and information age. Without printing matters radio and TV couldn’t have developed and established lasting in the public awareness. Just as little as the internet with its multi medial services of the World Wide Web. Electronic media are fleeting according to their appearance. They require a high technical access effort, but therefore have a virtual unlimited coverage.
Printing matters describe the ideal interface between perception practice through reading and perfect reading equitable information preparation for the human eye and brain. It applies the guideline: Electronics serve the visualization, print creates reminder values.
“What we see today on screens is on a the level of hot type!” (Hermann Zapf). Printing matters are not displaced through the electronic media, because the modern print- and publishing technologies are pathfinders and nutrient medium of digital media. A paradigm change takes place through the digitalization of print: Beside the mass communication comes an individualized communication. Print overtakes a leading function and integrates the electronics. Communication becomes interactive: printing matters can arise as quickly as a website; they respect individual information wishes and generate dialogues. That creates clearance for creativity and makes communication intuitional.
With it a central requirement is fulfilled, which was drafted by the communication searcher Marshal McLuhan like this: A model of intuitional communication is necessary to be capable of acting in the electronic age. On the one hand our culture will have changed in that way that it moves from the pure reasonable acting to intuition and creativity, on the other hand electronic media are creative and intuitional in their composition and handling.
Andreas Weber
About Andreas Weber
Andreas Weber is Principal of Andreas Weber global communication GmbH in Mainz, Germany. He has more than 20 years of experience as a communications analyst, consultant and publisher for media, marketing and business communication on an international basis. His business partners call him a "digital life-style evangelist" and a "communicationizer".
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