Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I’m here with Lewis Fix who is the Vice President at Domtar, welcome
Lewix Fix: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Cary: I’m happy you’re here. And I understand you guys launched a campaign last year, 2010, called Paper Because, maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.
Lewix: Sure. Yeah, Paper Because, the campaign is about paper and its use in personal and business and kind of showing people about the emotional and functional connections in their everyday and work lives, and then also looking at it from a sustainability perspective, making sure that the responsible use of paper and print in embedded in the messaging.
Cary: So I understand that along with that, you had an obviously a general business media kind of campaign with the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, but you also have a website paperBecause.com.
Lewix: We do, we have PaperBecause.com and then within that website are the different connections that people have with paper, whether it be through direct mail or using it within a business function or people in the way they interact with it. And then there’s also a knowledge center that contains a lot of the different information about the great things about education-wise, how people learn on paper and how people absorb information paper, and really striking the balance around paper… between paper and digital media.
Cary: So you have really a couple of different audiences for this. Obviously you’re trying to support the commercial print community, but you’re also trying to educate the consumers, or would be consumers of print.
Lewix: Right, certainly so. A big target of this campaign is business leaders. So showing the effectiveness of paper and print media within the business community, so whether you’re a large enterprise of a small company, you know, how print can be useful and paper can be useful at your organization.
Cary: Now, it seems to me, you know I’m, I’m a **** from the outside but it seems to me that, that a lot of what we do in our industry to kind of justify print is kind of from a defensive mode and rather it should be more, you know, what’s the customer’s business problem they’re trying to solve and what’s the best communication media, which may or may not include print. I mean, how do you… I mean, you’re obviously a paper company…
Lewix: Sure.
Cary: You obviously want everybody to print… right?
Lewix: Well, right. And I think it’s got to be the right balance. I mean, I think when you use print, and there are some guiding principles about you know, how you use it, the type of paper, knowing where it comes from, not overrunning, using it efficiently. And so it’s really it’s not about print all you want, we’ll make more, it’s about you know, where is print in relation to what the customer needs and, yeah, how do you strike that right… the right balance between what’s available from a electronic media perspective, what’s available from print. And when you do make that selection, making sure you make the right one and with the right types of suppliers.
Cary: So as you gear up for your 2011 campaign, are you thinking at all about helping… about maybe adding a piece to that that helps educate the printer on how to communicate that message better?
Lewix: Yeah, what we have… what we’re going to do on phase two of the campaign is to actually look at the different verticals that we think that paper applies to and so embedded in that will be for those different verticals, you know, for our supply chain partners that target those verticals, you know, how they can tailor the messages for whether it be healthcare or financial community or financial insurance. You know, how does that message, the print and the paper message, dovetail into what they want to accomplish in those different verticals?
Cary: And when will we start seeing that.
Lewix: You’ll start seeing that in April of 2011.
Cary: Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Lewix: All right, thank you.