A View Beyond the Trenches
Introduction
For me the In the Balance forum offered a rare opportunity to take a step back and look at the state of the print industry from a wider perspective. Like many working in a busy production environment, I don't get much time to gather my thoughts, let alone commit them to silicon. I do though always write up my impressions of any event like IPEX, if only as an aid to getting the issues straight in my own mind. This time, I have the advantage of this blog as a focus for my efforts.
While much of what I have presented here may appear pessimistic, it is so only to emphasise the need to address the fundamental issues facing the print industry. In truth, I am a pragmatist, and the overall message here is one of optimism for what I can see is a great future for the industry.
I have avoided specific examples of technology in this post, as they are fairly irrelevant to the bigger picture portrayed here. This of course means that you won't find any product endorsements for Xerox below. I would however like to thank Xerox for affording us the opportunity to participate, and for presenting a stimulating catalyst for debate.
Print in a pickle
Freudian analysis
While it is not generally regarded as constructive to publicly talk down one's industry, an industry collectively holding its tongue as it declined into rack and ruin would undoubtedly be in denial. So, taking the premise that the talking cure could go some way toward healing our ailing industry, I shall be frank about its current state. Let us then face the fact that the traditional print industry currently seems set on a course toward terminal decline.
Barry Hibbert's proposition for the In the Balance forum was that the print industry, although struggling at present, was still 'sexy'. When later this position became the central topic for discussion, after a particularly impassioned defence by Laurel Brunner, the Birmingham audience indulged in a bout of good old British Dunkirk spirit; cheering for pluck in the face of adversity.
I understand entirely Mr Hibbert's outlook on print. I too remember when print held a glamorous appeal as a neo-arts-and-crafts industry. All print employees were by association more creative than the average industrial employee was. I have though to take issue with Mr Hibbert's view that the glamour still prevails. 'Sexy', like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Given the current state of the print industry, only those intimately attached to it could possibly feel any romantic attraction to it. For most, our industry appears to have degenerated into a gross, bloated, sagging middle-aged frump.
That said, although the print industry has let itself go a bit of late, it is not yet at death's door. The print industry still has the potential to be 'sexy', it just needs to smarten up and get in shape a bit.
Why get sexy?
While Mr Hibbert was quite wrong in his assertion that print is still 'sexy', he was right in the underlying belief that it needs to be. One of the greatest failings of the current print industry is its inability to attract fresh blood.
There is a significant body of opinion within the industry that believes the key to solving the youth recruitment issue is for printers to simply invest in more gadgets. The belief being that most bright young people like to have gadgets ergo more gadgets equals more bright young people. More gadgets may help to project a younger image, but it is a grievous error to think that the sophisticated youth of today are fickle enough to be attracted by what amounts to a swag of tinsel in the window.
What we need to do is understand and react to what really attracts bright young people to any given career. It could be a sense of communal worth, like that of a nurse. Some of the more established boardrooms of the print industry might well need an incumbent nurse, but there is little other scope for altruistic pride from printing.
Another attraction could be the sort of craftsman's pride in one's work. There is still plenty of appeal on this count within the print industry. The promotion of this is however stifled by the derisory cynicism of an ageing workforce and the ill-informed insistence of insipid executives extolling the belief that technology makes the craft of printing redundant.
The truth is that technology will need to take phenomenal strides forward before it could conceivably take the craftsmanship out of print. The role of technology within print is to deal with the mundane so that people can focus on the craftsmanship. The print industry needs to acknowledge the value of its craftsmanship and stop selling itself short.
The ultimate attraction of any career is obviously wealth and security. Few would ever consider pursuing a career in a declining industry. The clear course of action to address this issue is to make print profitable. If the print industry manages to slim down and look more attractive, then the talent will readily return.
Evolve and prosper
Printersaurus Max
The traditional regime of continuous investment in bigger, faster plant to increase capacity only results in overweight companies too ponderous to react to changing markets and forced to feed on the junk food of commodity printing.
As is becoming painfully apparent to many print companies, the print industry is no more immune to market forces than any other form of commerce. The process of natural selection will determine the immediate future for them. Sadly, few have understood that in terms of traditional print markets, the selection forces are largely beyond their control. Each individual sabre-toothed tiger may have fought tooth and claw for its survival, ultimately though, the species didn't suit the evolved environment.
Most printers fight annihilation with extra capacity, reducing their prices and decimating their margins. Others get their fingers burnt diversifying into businesses they don't understand. Still more try to add value to their product with gimmicks that customers don't need and so don't buy.
Bernhard Schreier urged delegates at the In the Balance forum to decide the future technology employed in their print businesses by getting out a calculator and working out the cost per print. Again this is based on the outdated precept that cheaper production methods will increase profits. To succeed by this model, printers would also need to get out a crystal ball to predict the vagaries of the bulk print market and a magic wand to conjure up the increased orders to fill their additional capacity in a declining market.
The rise of the mammals
The future for print is not simply an issue of choosing imaging technologies. Print companies need to adapt to an economy that is being driven by the information revolution, away from traditional manufacturing toward right-sized cell based service solutions.
To move forward, the print industry needs to recognise that mass production is suited to the economies of a bygone era. As a product of the industrial revolution, mass production is now superseded by the production methods of the information revolution.
Profitably employing modest equipment to nurture strong customer relations is a far more sensible business model than squabbling for scraps off the rubbish heap of bulk print demand.
The printers that survive will be those that learn to understand the businesses of their customers and to adapt their skills, products and services to provide for the needs of their customers. Not those that gear up to provide a capacity that they then have to sell. Good profitable business is to be got by helping customers to achieve their business aims.
The IT effect
The broader impact of interloping technology
Information technology is set to have a far greater effect on the print business than many may imagine. The consensus among most printers appears to be that the Internet doesn't have a serious direct effect on the sort of work they do. Some do see that, as consumers shift their browsing habits, then there is a marked displacement of some previously printed material to new media. This seeking or projecting a direct causal link between diminishing print volumes and specific Internet applications is misguided.
Only a few visionary individuals would have predicted back in the eighteenth century that the new steam technology used to drive a pumping machine would be the key factor in the rise of the industrial revolution.
The rapidly increasing pace of the Internet and the almost universal adoption of personal computing provide a radically different environment for information exchange. Electronic document distribution and small-scale home/office publishing continue to have a surprisingly dramatic impact on the overall volume of commercial print.
The trend for reducing volumes is continued by the increasingly computer literate small to medium business community. They now use their available information more effectively to accurately target literature and often also deploy reliable, easy to operate small-scale digital printing equipment. The net effect is a large part of the market being lost to a multitude of tiny print jobs shared out amongst companies outside of the traditional print industry.
Another pertinent point is that digital printing has not been retarded by the inability to develop innovative imaging technologies, it has been throttled by the economies of shifting the high-resolution data required to produce large sheets of image at commercial print speeds. Now that technology can process and deliver the data efficiently to the point of imaging, we will soon witness the development of cheaper, cleaner and more consistent digital imaging technologies.
The laws of natural growth and decay suggest that the demise of traditional print technologies won't happen overnight, but it will happen suddenly. An important feature of the information revolution is that it is self-fuelling. The technologies it spawns accelerate the adoption and advancement of new technologies. The exponential decline of technologies such as litho and gravure will be much steeper than that witnessed for film planning when ctp was widely adopted.
The technology advantage
So the impact of upcoming technology on the print industry could be completely devastating. It won't be though; at least not for everybody. You see the negative effect of technology on traditional printing operations is less than half the story. All this new technology brings with it new opportunities. Any technology that provides enhanced versatility and reduced minimum cost of application is bound to give rise to new products.
Printers must realise that the encroachment of digital imaging technology into large-scale production environments is not simply a negative effect of falling run lengths. Digital imaging brings with it a wealth of new possibilities. It isn't just a case of carving up the existing business into thinner slices, there are countless new applications waiting to be developed.
Print companies need to engage with their customers and their prospective customers. Together they need to investigate how to combine their traditional skills with the extra capability of digital technologies to create novel approaches to everyday business objectives.
Up periscope
If printers are to avoid dying in the trenches of futile price wars, then they will need to read the reconnaissance from beyond the trenches. Print must look to other industries that have taken the lead in moving away from mass manufacturing toward designing portfolios of services around their core products. Print in general isn't a consumer market; it doesn't make commercial sense to sell print in bargain buckets.
Print has always been a hybrid between a service and a manufacturing industry. As the manufacturing side becomes less profitable, it makes perfect sense to concentrate on the service side of the business. That doesn't just mean improving customer services around existing operations by cutting lead times, increasing delivery rates, etc., but offering a greater diversity of products and backing them up with the skills to become graphic communications consultants.
There is an enormous untapped market for products that couldn't previously exist due to limitations that most businesses are not aware have been overcome. They are just waiting for informed print companies to sit down with those businesses and specify them.
The future of traditional print may look bleak, but the profitable future of graphic communications is assured.
Nigel Clark
Technical Director
Lynx dpm Limited