I have watched the printing industry in the U.S. change from a competitive, growing industry to a devastated industry trying to find a formula that will guarantee sustained growth. Two of my favorite print companies closed their doors this year. The economy use to support all sizes of printers, from a 1-man shop to a multi-location printer with 100+ employees.
We can all recite a dozen factors that impacted the printing business. Specialization and keeping up with new techniques has been pushed in all industries as the requirement to succeed. Doing everything right didn’t protect every business from losing money and closing their doors.
I am not talking about the businesses that are ignoring the changes happening around them and insist on doing business the same way it’s “always“ been done for years. I spoke with a representative of a company who said their web page was 11 years old and the owner was satisfied. He said the business owner doesn’t see how the internet can bring him sales. That is another article waiting to be written.
My interest is with those companies in touch with reality and making the effort to grow their business. The past couple of years have proven that following best practices for building a healthy business that can last for generations doesn’t always save the best companies. But the same questions remain an important part of building a business that will thrive and survive.These aren’t unique questions, but they are difficult questions. You can’t just answer them once. You need to continually ask these questions because of the new economy we are in. Evaluating the competition has to be done continually to position your brand in the market, but we don’t always question the position of future business opportunity for the company, brand or product.
25 years ago no one considered the impact of the internet on print. Magazines and newspaper sales were already struggling when people depended on publications, TV and radio for news and information. 25 years ago the changes were natural evolution of publications loosing their focus, competition and audience evolution. Today’s publications are far different and the competition is even bigger if you include blog sites. A small online publication can have significant influence that previously was only seen by publishers like Time Warner because they to have global reach.
It underscores the need to change the perspective of how you look at and answer the questions you ask when creating a marketing and business plan to build your brand. Textbook publishers have been slow to evolve their product even though the potential is tremendous in advancing education as well as offering parents cost effective up-to-date textbooks on disk. Their business model needs to change from print to digital or a combination of both. I am surprised that a renegade hasn’t stepped in to fill that void. Maybe we all have to look for a sales different model for selling product or services?
Slow to adapt, slow to admit it’s the wrong business is costly and could make it harder to recover. As humans we dislike change and surprises especially when this seem to be great. Someone in your organization has to be responsible for looking for trends – good and bad – so your business and marketing plans are created on a foundation of being proactive. With every economic downturn I have been through, those that were reactive business models suffered more than those operating as proactive.