We caught up with Francis A. McMahon, Executive Vice President at Canon Solutions America, in the wake of the virtual thINK Ahead 2020 Conference to talk about how Canon’s customers are faring in the crisis, how Canon itself has responded, and how the crisis has demonstrated the wisdom of the Grateful Dead lyric, “Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places If you look at it right.”

WhatTheyThink: At the start of the year, everybody was looking toward a positive 2020, printing shipments were up—and then March happened. How have Canon’s customers been reacting to the crisis?

Francis McMahon: I talk to a minimum of two customers a day, and probably a max of five a day, and people are really looking at printing differently. They want shorter runs—and they don’t just want print-on-demand, they want super-fastprint-on-demand. And they’re not as quality-sensitive anymore. It’s changing the value of what print is to the people that are buying it. For the marketer and the advertising agency, they’re saying, ‘Wow. If I can get a higher return, and I can turn it around very fast, and I can do shorter runs, that's a good thing.”