Written by Colin Gillman | 03 February 2012

It’s not hard to be half decent at b2b marketing. After all, it’s a simple matter of promoting your company, products, services and even your people to other businesses in your sector who might have an interest in what you have to offer to make their own business better. A more simple way of looking at it is that they have the money and you want it, and how do you go about getting their money in a way that is both ethical and to the mutual benefit of both organisations?

You would be amazed at how many so called ‘marketeers’ I have seen on the manufacturing/supplier side of our industry that fail to grasp this simple process and instead treat every facet of marketing their company as if they were guarding rocket science. This type of incompetence is usually referred to as The Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties and work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. Managing upward is the concept of a subordinate finding ways to subtly "manage" superiors in order to limit the damage that they end up doing.

I once worked in the marketing department of a global graphics giant that was run by a Peter Principal marketing manager who was in fact a failed channel sales manager that had been given the marketing managers job because they wanted to limit the amount of damage he might do in the sales division. It was a classic sideways promotion. The company was bloated and arrogant because it was the 1980’s and business was booming and money was flying in through open windows. They had the products that printers were clamouring for. Therefore who needed marketing when things were going this good? Then there was a recession in the 90s along with a technology shift – sound familiar? Suddenly everybody was looking at marketing to generate new business leads, and Peter, who thought it was the sales division’s function to generate its own blasted sales leads, wasn’t happy. So he started the business trend for ‘meetings’. This was a new marketing tactic as we had never had ‘meetings’ like this before.

The ‘meeting’ was a fantastic method to disguise the fact that Peter was failing to market the business properly. The best part of this strategy, as far as I could ever figure out, was that if Peter could spend his entire working day having internal meetings, his department would appear to be so busy we would never have any time to do any actual marketing. Therefore any downward dip in revenue budgets must lie entirely at the feet of ‘sales’.

Before I continue, let us first consider that the company where I worked was selling goods to printers, or what we call print service providers or PSPs today. Printers, by their very nature, are hairy bottomed belt and braces manufacturers. No offence, but I speak as a qualified printer having spent three years at the London College of Printing working for my City & Guilds ticket. I have found that having spent my younger days on the tools has always held me in good stead for knowing what it is that printers want and how they behave, and I continue to think and swear like a printer even to this day. Now in my time I have met a handful of very posh print business owners and production managers, but on the whole we’re all pretty much the same, and what’s more we’re not that hard to sell too either!

So in one of Peter’s internal meetings he was going round the table in search of ideas to attract new business and was running the flag up the flagpole to see who might salute it – he really did use such dreadful analogies – whereupon he turned to me and said “Colin. You’re my Tight End in a third down situation. Go wide.” Eh? I honestly didn’t have a clue what he was asking of me. I was new and this was early days in my marketing career, so I stared at him for what seemed like an age before I felt a wise old sage of a colleague kicking my foot, and talking out the side of his mouth he tightly whispered “Feed him any old pile of bullshit just to shut him up.” So I said we should undertake a series of radio advertisements.

I explained that radio could bring our advertising to life, give our company an identity, and reinforce our brand. I felt that if done properly, it would tightly focus our advertising campaigns and help us to better target printers. As I pointed out, in every printing company I have either worked or visited there was always a radio blasting out over the noise of presses. I then explained that the additional benefits of using radio meant we could communicate to potential customers at any time of day or night and we could even select certain times of the day in which to advertise more frequently. I closed by saying that radio advertising works by repetition – increased exposure to a message will reinforce it - and that radio is one of the most cost-effective means of creating frequent, focused communications to a massive audience.

I had looked at our budgets and had figured that the cost of a radio advert was far less than what we were spending at the time on paying an advertising agency to create ‘artistic’ print advertising with photographic models under lighting in studios on expensive sets shaking hands over desks with earnest expressions on their faces. My mistake, probably, was to conclude with the caveat that printers, on the whole, tend not to align themselves with such phoney looking corporate imagery.

You could have heard a pin drop before he launched into me. “Our customers don’t listen to the radio,” he raged. “They work incredibly long hours and certainly won’t have time for listening to radios!” He went on about how radio was not a credible medium for b2b marketing and shot down every one of my ideas in flames. Nobody had ever had the guts to pitch such a fanciful idea to Peter before. He wasn’t a printer and had probably never been on the shop floor of a printing company. Besides, Peter only ever listened to Radio Four and was judging our customers by his own personal standards. If it wasn’t good enough for him it couldn’t possibly be good enough for our customers.

That was over twenty years ago but there are still people like Peter in marketing departments up and down the country who are afraid to do something that they have never done before, and if you continue to do nothing, you will continue to get nothing in return. It’s all about having a “Who Dares Wins,’ Rodney” mindset. Those who have the chutzpah and are prepared to stand up and be counted and dare to do something different will eventually succeed.

This time next year Rodney, we’ll be millionaires.

Colin Gillman
colin@graphicdisplayworld.co.uk

Written by Colin Gillman | 05 January 2012

According to the Office for National Statistics almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections. Some 45% of people surveyed said they made use of the net while out and about, compared with 31% in 2010. The most rapid growth was among younger people, where 71% of internet-connected 16 to 24-year-olds used mobiles.

I’m not surprised by this statistic given that my thirteen year old son wanted a Blackberry Curve more than anything for Christmas. When I was thirteen all I wanted was a Raleigh Chopper and a girlfriend. It’s a totally different world today. I didn’t get my first mobile phone until I was in my late 20s. It was the size of a brick housed in a briefcase. I thought I looked the bee’s knees with it at the time, but could never have imagined that such a thing would one day be reduced to the size of a packet of fags and I would be able to do my Christmas shopping on it.

I blame all this social media malarkey. I love it, but where will it end? It’s growing at a phenomenal pace and doesn’t look like ever slowing down. You only have to look at the graphics below to see how bonkers everything has become. Social media is everywhere and is expanding like the clappers!

Every 60 seconds or so some 100 new people join LinkedIn; 70 new websites are published; 600 videos are uploaded to YouTube; 1,500 blogs are posted; and nearly 700,000 Facebook status updates are posted. And all in 60 little seconds. Tick, tick, tick... there goes another 600 videos to YouTube.

What is surprising about social media though, is that despite its meteoric uptake it hasn’t caught on in the world of business to business (b2b) commerce anywhere near as fast as it has with domestic users. And this is because b2b marketeers still can’t get their heads around it, mostly because they can’t accurately measure its return on investment – which is marketing speak for not doing anything about it.

While domestic use of social media is growing at an exponential rate, a recent US based survey from Accenture Global Marketing, “Embracing Social Media in a B2B Context,” shows that only 8 percent of US b2b companies are taking full advantage of all that social media has to offer. However, some 65 percent of individuals surveyed indicated that they felt social media is “very important,” with 30 percent of individuals claiming it is “extremely” important and cannot be ignored” for b2b business.

The report also highlights that many b2b companies do actually believe that social media can make a significant difference to their business, yet they lack any form of social media marketing plan to help them take advantage of the opportunities it presents. The research also shows that where such a social media plan exists, many business managers need to have more confidence in their employers plans and strategies in order to make social media work for them, as opposed to simply using it as an add-on to their overall marketing efforts.

In my experience, simply encouraging your staff to ‘do’ social media is a bit like leading a horse to water. Some people readily ‘get it’ while others haven’t a clue and have no intention of ever going near it. You could say it was a bit like ‘horses for courses’; some are suited to social media and others plainly are not. Therefore, for the whole social media thing to truly take off in a b2b context (or until perhaps the 71% of the younger generation enters full time UK employment) many companies are going to have to start schooling their people in socialnomics. And this short video will explain why:

Some might see this socialnomics video as just another series of fancy graphics bouncing along to a Fatboy Slim soundtrack, but as far as I am concerned we are going to have to start working smarter in future when it comes to using social media in our b2b marketing. Now call me old fashioned, but the way I see it sales generates revenue while marketing generates profits. Marketing, including social media marketing, is about efficiency. Put simply, marketing is a process of decreasing the time, money, and resources required to communicate with customers and make it easy for them to buy your products and services. Therefore the more efficient your marketing is, the more profit you make, and this in my opinion (for many print service providers) is what you should keep in mind when making your initial first steps into social media marketing.

This doesn’t mean that all you need to do is set up a Twitter account; call everybody ‘tweeps’ and repeatedly offer business cards or pop up displays for thirty eight quid every other day. That is not social media marketing and you would be surprised how many printers actually do this. Instead, think about how you can generate greater profits with your social media marketing to make your company/products/services seem more interesting so that others might take a greater interest in you. You need to think of ways of creating hooks with which to catch fish. And those hooks need to be baited with something interesting in order to entice the fish.

One way you can do this is by setting up a simple YouTube channel with some short promotional videos about your company and its services, or a few customer case studies, and use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn etc. to drive potential viewers towards it. I know a printer that did such a thing and promoted his company video on LinkedIn and got more than 500 views on his YouTube channel. That’s 500 meaningful people that never knew he existed until then, and many of whom are no doubt potential customers that now know exactly what he can do for them and where they can go to get it. 

Now that’s what I call ROI in social media marketing.

Happy New Year!

Colin Gillman

colin@graphicdisplayworld.com

Written by Colin Gillman | 13 December 2011

When I started in the print trade as a skinny young lad I was fascinated by the sheer number of sales reps that would call in on our firm. There seemed to be no end of them, all calling in every two weeks or so to ‘pick up an order’.

Ours was a very small firm (which meant I got promoted much faster than would usually be expected), and my boss began to tire from having so many reps calling on him so he commenced the process of ‘showing me the ropes’, whereupon the arduous task of ‘placing the orders’ was handed down to a malnourished, scruffy looking teenager with nothing more than a twitch in his bell bottoms and bum fluff on his chin.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Marvellous!  Getting to place the orders meant long boozy lunchtimes spent eating and drinking in the pub with these reps and all I had to do was dish out the odd order here and there. I had it made in the shade. This was better than the sex I wasn’t having.

Our firm specialised in wide format photographic printing, or reprographics as it was called it back then. We were ‘industrial photographers’ and haughtily considered ourselves ‘technicians’ and a cut above the average ink jockey, and there speaks the sheer folly of callow youth, but that’s another story. The thing about industrial photography as it was back then was there were hundreds of different applications for all manner of processes, and for every application there was an expensive product.

The concept of a one stop shop hadn’t yet been thought of, therefore when I wanted to order hand developing solution I ordered it from one company; acetic acid for the stop bath from another; fixer from somebody else; ammonia from Fred down the road; roll film from half a dozen firms who probably are no longer with us today; same with bromide paper; negs came from somebody else; electrostatic paper from anybody knocking it out cheap; microfilm from the firm next door – I could go on. The list was seemingly endless, and there was always a long line of firms queuing up to service our account. And service us they did, and hand on heart, we never had problems with products that weren’t immediately resolved. Happy days.

When I realised I could earn half as much more money in litho than I was making as a swab jockey, I came across almost the exact same thing with the suppliers in this sector too. What I liked was these reps also knew their onions in addition to their products. These guys had all worked in the trade before going into sales, and even better they knew what was going on in and around their area and were a font of knowledge and information on who was printing what, where, and when.

The reason I liked dealing with such a diverse bunch of suppliers was because it not only broadened my horizons, but it provided security for if and when a product might fail. If it did there was always a ‘specialist’, often the owner of the business who could be relied upon to pop in and sort out the majority of any problems we had. And for as long as I kept buying from all of these small independent suppliers, I hardly recall ever having that many problems.

The years have passed and we have since witnessed the rise of the one stop shop supplier, the decline of many small local dealers, and we have said goodbye, more than once, to some of the biggest names and players in our industry. But, as those of us of a certain age will testify, these things have a tendency to be cyclical, therefore I am predicting the rise of the smaller dealers once more in our sector, notably as the gap between litho, cut sheet digital and wide format and hi speed inkjet continues to close and convergence, yes that old chestnut, gains momentum. 

Right now the wide format sector is alive with all kinds of different dealers around the country servicing the arse out of their customers. And these dealers know their onions too. They know their market; their products; their customers; and importantly, they are happy to get to know you, maybe have a beer with you and get to know more about the needs of your business too.

I have known plenty of printers in my time who have little or no time for sales people, mostly fobbing them off onto a junior member of staff who can no longer be seen to be sloping off down the pub with them as I once did, to further my education.

I’m not one to throw eggs but, seeing as it’s nearly Christmas, and in the spirit of goodwill to all men, ask yourself this: Do you give sales reps much of your time? And if so do you know what else they might offer that could be beneficial to your business? And do you make the time to have a cup of tea with them and talk about what is happening around the trade? And who is printing what for whom?

I am not suggesting for a minute that you start hugging sales reps, but maybe the next time a new one comes knocking it might be prudent to stop, listen for a bit and maybe give them a little bit longer than usual because, you never know, there might just be a slim chance that they know something that you don’t.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Colin Gillman
colin@graphicdisplayworld.com

Written by Colin Gillman | 08 November 2011

Print and cut is not a term generally used by commercial printers outside of the sign and screen sector. In fact, ask any commercial litho/digital printer if he knows what a Gerber Edge is and he will probably think you are talking about a new kind of multiple blade shaving razor.

However, if you showed a commercial printer the neat little desk top VersaStudio BN-20 from Roland, he will immediately ‘get it’, especially when he sees it producing multiple high resolution inkjet images onto adhesive backed vinyl using metallic silver ink and contour cutting around those images to make bespoke short run labels, stickers, signs, packaging concepts, and even t-shirts.

This tidy little package from Roland is packing some serious punch, especially for the £5,499 asking price which, if you can find anybody to sell you one (they are that popular), makes it perfect for anybody looking to start up a graphics business from scratch or extend their existing range of print services. Think high street print shops and digital print studios. I think this is a highly versatile little print and cut solution that, once they see it for themselves, should have many commercial printers reaching for their cheque books.

But its appeal is not just limited to high street print retailers. I sent the following YouTube video below to a friend of mine who runs a commercial printing company. He specialises in bespoke label solutions for small food and grocery producers, so I sent him a note suggesting he take a look, particularly as he could sell a whole new range of products to his existing customers such as packaging design concepts and point of sale displays and so forth.

I took a call from him while I was at the BAPC Conference the other week and he was so excited by the prospect that he wanted to buy one without delay, and by-the-way could I help him to find a sign and graphics company to go with it! Eh? What was fascinating was ten minutes earlier I was talking to a commercial litho printer who had done just that. He had decided to get into wide format with Roland, but instead of investing in just the one wide format printer, this guy had gone the whole hog and bought a sign company to bolt onto his litho printing business. At last! It’s starting to happen.

I have been saying it for a couple of years, but now it is trending. Market convergence is fast becoming a reality, and it’s thanks to innovative little products such as this that are helping to open people’s eyes to the possibilities that print and cut solutions can offer.

What really impresses me is the way that this printer is the perfect device for any budding ‘bedroom’ printers out there. I’ll grant you that it’s a step beyond a John Bull printing kit, but if I was looking to get a new graphics business off the ground then I’d certainly be auditioning this little printer.

Speaking of ‘bedroom’ printers, I know an ex policeman who, when he retired, bought a Roland VersaCamm and stuck it in his spare bedroom and used it to flog advertising posters and other such POS material to his local shops. He got so busy with it that he now owns a full blown display graphics printing company and has a fleet of wide format machines including an Agfa Annapurna flat bed, so from small acorns grow great oaks.

Therefore for these reasons, along with its ability to fire the imagination and encourage printers to re think their approach to market, that I am naming the Roland VersaStudio BN-20 as my product of the year.

Just try and find somebody to sell you one. They’re as rare as hens’ teeth.

Colin Gillman
colin@graphicdisplayworld.com