Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com, and we’re back with Eric Liggett who is General Manager of KCI. Welcome again.
Eric Liggett: Well thank you. Yeah, happy to be here.
Cary Sherburne: We’re happy to have you back. So what’s next for you?
Eric Liggett: Yeah, what’s next for us, well, I tell you I think as we spoke about previously in another conversation. It’s like a rocket ship, the area where we’re headed into this e-Marketing space. And I think that we’re on the cutting edge right now with some of the folks that we’re working with, which is an interesting space to be in from where we were five years ago. So, we’ve invested a lot in our marketing efforts. We have full-time marketing professionals on staff where we wouldn’t have even considered that six years ago, somebody who manages and builds websites. And so, keeping on the cutting edge is, electronically, I think, is where we want to be, leading edge, maybe sometimes, investments early on, but, yeah.
Cary Sherburne: So, in terms of trying to get a balance because you still have equipment that you need to fill up, right? I mean, so…
Eric Liggett: Sure, yeah.
Cary Sherburne: … I mean, this is one of the challenges I hear from printers all the time is, I don’t want to get into all this electronic stuff that’s going to take away from my offset or my digital work coming in. But then I hear other people say the electronic stuff brings current work in.
Eric Liggett: Yeah. That’s an interesting question. We’ve found that with our being in a direct mail space that we were already doing a lot of digital work. We were already doing a lot of black only. So, the investment was already there for us. We were already committed to it and then when we started to move into the color digital, the short run just supplemented our ability to be able to offer a more full service to our clients.
Cary Sherburne: Great. So you’re like everybody, waiting for the economy to get really good again, but you’re investing and you’re planning and just moving ahead and not waiting for it to – not with your head in the sand waiting for it to change.
Eric Liggett: Well, yeah, the economy is a factor, but right now we’re really building the infrastructure and the company is positioned financially to be able to grow our sales and continue to be profitable through the recession, which is important, you know, we’ve seen price erosion. You know, specifically in the print and mail areas. So as we broaden, you know, our services to our clients and perspective clients and that begins to change. So yeah, there’s some unknowns, there’s no doubt about that.
Cary Sherburne: And what about social media. Are you doing anything there?
Eric Liggett: Ah, social media. Well, we’ve been working with some good folks to help us out there. We haven’t put a full time PR person on staff, but that seems like a direction a lot of companies are going with. With me being knowledgeable about it, the integration of new technologies sites such as QR codes, Quick Response Codes, it’s been important to us, not because of the code itself, but in the knowledge that we can bring to our customer base and new clients. And we talk to our clients about things like, is your website that you’re pointing them to through your QR code is that mobily optimized? And then are you tracking which landing pages are you using? Are you using multiple QR codes or are you using just one QR code to point in the same direction. We’re educating about that. But you know, there’s these emerging technologies still and to try to get our arms around that is going to be really important for us.
Cary Sherburne: Yeah, it sounds like you’ve got a good, you now, you’ve brought onboard a good group of people and you’ve got some partners that are helping you through this as well. So…
Eric Liggett: We do.
Cary Sherburne: That’s great.
Eric Liggett: We try to work with the very best, hire the best, and I think it’s been successful so far.
Cary Sherburne: That’s great. And I hope it continues for you. Thanks.
Eric Liggett: Well thank you, yeah.
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