The Printing Industries of America (PIA), of which CPIA is a member, breaks the printing market down into 17 areas ranging from annual reports to packaging. Six of these categories are advertising-driven: direct mail, promotion, inserts, catalogues, magazines and coupons. Advertising also partially affects packaging, convenience printing and labels.

Needless to say, advertising, whether it is a one colour flyer, a four-colour brochure or a 128-page catalogue, fuels the printing market. In fact, product promotion and advertising is the number one source of business for printers.

Despite the growth of the Internet, corporate advertisers are still turning to print to advertise. It’s interesting to see the amount of print advertising dot-com companies do. Quebecor recently credited some of its increased sales to Internet companies’ use of print advertising. Sympatico and Excite, two Internet portals, now have magazines.

If printing customers were to lose their trust in print as an effective means to advertise, our industry would collapse overnight. Categories such as business forms and directories, which don’t depend as much on advertising, are shrinking. Fortunately, corporate customers do believe in print advertising and are spending more.

It’s ironic that the printing industry doesn’t also believe in print as a means to advertise. It’s roughly the equivalent of General Motors not believing in the internal combustion engine. As an industry, we printers do very little advertising in print—maybe a brochure every four or five years, hardly any direct mail and, possibly, a small Yellow Pages ad that looks like everyone else’s. I even know a printer who is proud of the fact that the only advertising his company has ever done is business cards. If our customers ever found out, we’d be in trouble.
I have heard plenty of reasons not to advertise. Statements like: “I tried it once, and it didn’t work,” “It’s too expensive,” “I don’t have enough time,” or “Only the big guys do it” (which they don’t), are all too common. The problem is that the printing industry has always been reactive, not proactive. We are so busy doing what our customers want, we don’t take the time to understand why they choose print.

The demand for printing has always grown faster than the economy. In the ’90s it all changed. Now the printing market is growing at the same rate or slower than the economy. If you want your company to grow, just being there and doing the work the sales rep brings in the door will not work any more. Undercutting the other guy on price never works in the long term. The only other profitable option in a mature industry is to out-market the competition. Just think of the cola, beer, or car marketing wars.

Getting and keeping business in today’s marketplace requires a completely different mindset than in the past. Successful printers are going to have to stand for more than service, quality and price—all taken as a given by most customers now anyway. Well-executed advertising campaigns will set the leaders apart. They will create the notion in the minds of their customers that they are better than their competition at making certain products, selling to certain industries, or solving certain problems.

In the next 10 years, a printing company’s ability to market or advertise itself will become as important, if not more important, than the number of presses in its shop. Printers that don’t learn what their customers have always known, “that advertising works,” will be left to fight over the scraps on price alone