Hello, my name is Walter Payne, I am President of Imagemark Business Services and we’re located in Gastonia, North Carolina, which is just outside the queen city of charlotte.  And one of the things that we are doing as a company is that we are really focusing on the need to understand how to market to the different generations.  As you know, there are four generations that there is a lot of specific information out; traditionalists, Generation X, Baby Boomers, and Generation Y, and we have this new group coming up called Generation Z, which is the 13-14 years-olds who represent the future buyers of products and services that our country will want to market to.

One of the things that we do as an organization on behalf of our clients is that we try to understand how to market to these generations.  And what are the influencers in their life that make them make purchasing decisions?  As a result, one of the things that we have to do is we have to be good practitioners of cross-media strategies in terms of marketing to these generations. 

As you know, the Generation Y, which is the up and coming generation, is becoming a huge group of purchasers in our world today and they grew up in the technology age.  So consequently, you have to be able to go out and approach them with your marketing efforts via the technologies that exit today.  The SMS text messaging, also personalized URL’s, even direct mail and so forth that those generations in particular don’t care so much about the hardcopy print as much as they do being able to look at a cell phone and react and respond to purchasing decisions through what they find either on the website via their cell phone, or perhaps even just doing something with messages, responding to a message, text message.  One of the things that just happened in these recent weeks with the destruction caused by the earthquakes in Haiti was the fact that in a very short period of time, over $10 million was raised via test response.  A $10 donation by responding to a certain number raised over $10 million in as little as two weeks.

So, we as marketing service providers in this industry of print must become professionals and experts on how to utilize the technology that exists today.  It’s not just print, it’s not just direct mail, it’s not personalized URL’s, it’s not just text messaging, it’s the ability to pull all those products and services together and use them to deploy the message of our clients to the people that they want to market to. 

So, if you want to survive today know these technologies.