Discussion

By Chuck on Feb 23, 2009

Hi Cary! Great question. I personally think Print Service Provider is a good broad description for the many shapes and sizes of operations that produce print. It is a lot more accessible than "Marketing Service Provider". Do a Google Search on the term Marketing Service Provider, and what you will find is an incredible array of companies, very few of which look like they were ever Printing companies to me. So I'd like to challenge the pundits and consultants to come up with a name that actually describes this direction they are advocating that PSPs take their companies. And I look forward to the responses you get!

By Ric on Feb 24, 2009

I remember 10 or so years ago a similar line of discussion around "What is digital printing?" Did assigning a label to this ever really accomplish anything? To this day calling myself a "digital printer" vs. an "offset printer" (we do both) has absolutely no meaning to 99% of my customer base. Yet saying "Yes, I can do that in 24 hours" has tremendous meaning! The terms PSP or MSP only have value if they allow me to communicate some level of differentiation to my customers. I would be a fool to believe that success in adding fulfillment services would come from rebranding myself a FSP. If I add multiple additional services and then aggregate all that into one generic label like PSP I wonder if I'm not actually damaging any brand equity I could build by "genericizing" the additional services into a category that no-one except consultants would recognize...

Just for kicks I just ran a Google search for "print service provider". First page natural results were from Adobe, this site, Cap Ventures, Printable, HP, and a site that specializes in defining acronyms. Notably, not one single printing company returned on the top page using this term. This really begs the question: Who cares? My customers don't use the term to find suppliers. Printing companies don't use the term to define themselves. Outside of those two things what possible value does this label add?

We provide many services outside of just putting ink on paper. We focus our marketing efforts to communicate the fact that we offer these valuable services to existing and potential clients. Our sales staff work hard to make sure that customers understand where these additional services can add value to their businesses. And I do all that using a time-tested term that any potential or existing customer can easily understand: "Printer"

By Mark Flanders on Feb 24, 2009

Greetings,

I agree with Ric. Being proud of our trade, in an outdated sort of way, may not be such a bad thing. Once upon a time, after 30 years or so, you could call yourself a printer, and people knew you could help them communicate to the public. Maybe this will have less to do with which machines or media we are talking about, and the term Printer will remain vital as technology changes.

thanks,

mjf

By Stan Anglen on Feb 24, 2009

Ric got it right!

By Brad on Feb 24, 2009

It is important to remember that the value proposition that once defined “printers” has changed and it will take, in my opinion, more than a name change, a new acronym or SIC classification to regain or develop a new value proposition. In the “old days” if you wanted print you had to go to a commercial printer, if you wanted economy of scale and mass reach in printed content, you had to go to a commercial printer. If you wanted good 4-color quality, you had to go to a commercial printer. You do not have to engage a printer to do any of those things now. I think those providers who are channel neutral (i.e. content output in any channel/technology) are most likely to survive, especially if they add strategic capabilities that address issues of cost of customer acquisition/retention, satisfaction, cross/up-selling and ROI measurements. The market doesn’t care what formerly “printers” are called, it will just as happy to call them out of business if they do not meet the requirements of the 21st Century marketplace.

By Michael Josefowicz on Feb 24, 2009

I also vote for Printer. Everyone understands it. Market service provider, print service provider, originate up at the corporate level, not on the ground. Sounds good at conferences or in a business plan. Or when someone is trying to figure out a "marketing plan."

But imagine saying to a real person who wants to spend money, "Hi, I'm a market communications service provider." Or "My company is a Print Service Provder". No offense, but it sounds alot like sanitation engineer.

Printer. Ben Franklin was a printer. My dad was a printer. A nice word with a 500 year tradition.

Plus almost everyone on the planet knows pretty much what it means.

By Ric on Feb 24, 2009

Wow...I thought I'd just be cornered by 16 different consultants for my comments. I had no idea people would actually agree with me! Cary, you asked what is a PSP? Well, it's nothing more than a printer that offers additional services beyond putting ink on paper -- but it's still a printer.

I'm always struck by the enormous disconnect between the people who provide printing services for a living and the people who consult, talk & write about printing services for a living. Terms like PSP and MSP sound great in a corporate environment, but are almost useless inside the actual businesses they are describing. I have this fantasy of some senior executive in Xerox or Adobe or HP waking up in the middle of the night with an ahah! moment, saying to themselves: "I know! If I just describe printing companies with diversified services as Print Service Providers then customers will flock to them and we can sell more of our equipment/software/etc.!"

I wish it was that simple! When I first opened my shop I had been working as a consultant to large companies like those I mentioned above. Filled with the insight this work provided me I named the company Wythken Advanced Print Communications and set off to sell. But all the potential customers I spoke with couldn't figure out what we did. Every conversation would eventually end up with them saying, "Oh! You're a printer!" After six months with little success I changed the name of the company to Wythken Printing and the business just took off!

Like any business, we're defined by our customers, with very little control over that. I don't pick the papers, inks, or processes that I use here every day. My customers do, based on their needs and preferences. That concept extends all the way out to how I describe and market my business. Lose sight of that concept, even for a minute, and you're likely to be OUT of the printing business!

By Michael Josefowicz on Feb 25, 2009

Just goes to show the power of words. For the last ten years or so, during funny money times, it was "Credit Default Swaps," instead of bad debt insurance. Even today, its the "stimulus" package, even though the title of the bill is the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

No doubt printers have to be part of marketing and advertising. Some mail houses become Printers - they are marketing companies. Some dot.com entrepreneurs - lulu.com - use Printers. Many service bureaus became Printers.

But it obfuscates, instead of clarifies, to call Printers anything but Printers, it's their unique advantage.

In the context of being "solution providers," my take is that the first solution they have to provide is to make it easier, faster, better to produce and buy/sell Print.

By Cary Sherburne on Feb 25, 2009

Ric, I have to admit that I have never been a printer or held any production roles, but somehow I found the acronym PSP to be offensive. Although I frequently use the term print service provider in my writing. I think this particular piece of vendor-speak originated in the 1990s, most likely at Xerox, when these non-traditional suppliers began targeting the graphic arts industry with products like the Xerox DocuTech and Kodak Lion Heart (remember that one?). They faced a bit of an internal conundrum. They SELL printers and they SELL TO printers and the language can get a little confusing as they are laying out their strategies--are you talking about the box or the person? So out came this new term, print service provider.

If you are not faced with making the distinction between the box and the person, as is true with most of the practitioners and those who buy from them, printer remains a viable nomenclature and practitioners should justifiably be proud of what they do.

I raised the question, because I don't want to use vendor-speak and I don't want to offend these proud professionals!

In terms of the SIC or NAICS code changes, I think it is important because so much of the data we use to analyze and forecast the industry is based on U.S. Census Bureau data. The classifications almost make no sense anymore. I tried to get an association interested in working with the Census Bureau to redefine them into more modern terms, but there were no takers, and now the opportunity has gone by. There won't be another opportunity to reclassify the industry for another four years. Sad... but I suppose we can live with it.

So Printer it is! Listen up, vendor community!

By Jim Olsen on Feb 25, 2009

Before I ran trade associations and became a consultant, I used to have to work - namely run printing and publishing companies. Since I was a "printer' for the first 30 years of my career in the industry, I proudly lay claim to still using that term to describe myself.

A few years ago I took on one of the most difficult individual tasks I have ever done. I edited the Fourth Edition of PODi's Best Practices. Not only was I charged with making sense of and writing each case study, I had to determine the best practices and trends that were happening in the digital printing industry.

I developed a large spreadsheet showing the various atrributes of each case study; e.g. VDP, database managment, digital asset management, web-to-print, Was it to increase sales or achieve a better workflow? Was it direct mail, catalogs, or documents? What were the vertical markets? etc but, most importantly, one of the categories was: "Effectiveness in helping their customers reach their goal." There were in all about 25 categories.

As I stepped back and looked at the long prinout laid out on the floor across the room, a light bulb went on and I said to myself: "Hey, these companies are marketing services providers." So I included that as being one of the trends.

Perhaps someone else had already used this term in the same context, but I don't remember ever encountering it before. Perhaps the phrase was born the day we published the book. Perhaps not. It really doesn't matter.

What matters is that I recognized that the very successful printers of the day, at least the ones who submitted case studies to PODi, were achieving great things over and above simply making money on a print job. They were offering value adding services that were helping customers be more successful and profitable. Not just simply bidding on a job, printing it, billing it, and not really caring how successful the print job was for the customer. (In my previous life I was guilty of that more than once.)

So there you have it. It's not important as to whether I coined the phrase or not. It is important that many progressive and successful companies who own digital printing presses look upon themselves as marketing services providers and not simply as printers.

It has been my experience that many printers produce commodities and marketing services providers do not. They produce high profit value added services. The are in a different game.

Jim Olsen, Printer and Free Thinker
Imagination, Ink.
Saratoga Springs NY 12866
518-852-1219

By Patrick Whelan on Feb 25, 2009

Define your company by what you provide (communications), not how you provide it (printing). Kind of like sticking to the benefits and not the features.

By Michael Josefowicz on Feb 25, 2009

With all due respect, many printers have always provided value added service. Trade printers produced "commodities" and by all accounts many did very well.

Back in the olden days, printers were publishers, centers of free thinking, typesetters.

The issue is that from one point of view, market service providers does make lots of sense. It's just that from the view on the ground, it mostly doesn't.

The biggest problem is that while our trade are experts at Print, they are usually not experts at marketing. That is a separate discipline that needs years of experience.

By lumping it all together, market service provider encourages the incorrect idea that one company has to learn a completely new expertise. The much more reasonable course is for Printers to build trust based networks with Marketers and Designers.

Being a great Printer is already a full time job.

By Chuck on Feb 26, 2009

A lot of great comments, I agree with most of what I've read. I think the term PSP came about to encompass a wider variety of printing operations than aren't "traditional offset printing companies", for example, to refer to all producers of print including things like "CRDs" and "FMs". But yes, my company calls ourselves an "Online Printing Company", and we would never use either PSP or MSP to describe what we do when talking to a customer.