Some years ago, a print industry consultant stood in front of a room full of print industry CEOs and C-suite executives. He asked attendees to take out a sheet of paper and write down the top three things that differentiated their company from their competitors. Then he asked each attendee to fold up the paper and hand it to the person sitting on their right. “Now,” he said, “Read the paper your neighbor just handed to you.”
The room was pregnant with uncomfortable silence. "How many of you are looking at the same list that you just wrote?” he asked. “Show of hands."
Only the brave hands went up.
Can You Really Name Your Differentiators?
If you were to participate in the same exercise today, what would you write? Would your list be substantively different from someone else’s? If you were to write, “Great quality, great prices, and great customer service,” you can teleport back to that room in the 1990s. Most companies said that then, and most of them say it now. Just look at your competitors’ websites.
As a result, those things that should be true differentiators (we know, for example, that not all printers actually have great customer service) have become essentially meaningless.
As today's technology brings parity to many printers’ workflows and anyone can write anything about themselves on their websites, what makes one print shop truly stand out from another? Recently, WhatTheyThink talked to Alan Davis, president of BPI Media, who uses his company’s investment in automation to promote the ability to turn around a proof not in days, but in minutes. Now that’s differentiation.
But the ability to articulate such differentiation is rare. An older Swedish survey of 136 commercial printing houses found that printers mainly positioned themselves around price, lead time, print quality, and flexibility, a study that may as well have been conducted in the U.S. today.
Even when printers believe quality, price, and service are legitimate differentiators, without quantitative back-up (“we have 500+ five-star Google reviews”), those claims are useless as marketing points. They are so meaningless, in fact, that when it comes to AI search, AI engines ignore them.
Even diversification is no longer a differentiator. A 2023 PRINTING United Alliance/Canon survey summary reports that 78% of commercial printers said they were diversifying beyond commercial printing, with 58.7% adding wide-format, 34.6% adding packaging/converting, 18.3% adding promotional products, and 15.4% adding apparel decoration. With so many firms expanding into the same adjacent categories, this can make messaging look very similar across sites.
It’s not that differentiation doesn’t exist. It’s that it often occurs at the operational level: specific equipment, turnaround capability, color management, fulfillment, packaging expertise, and vertical specialization. The problem is that many companies do not translate those differences into clear market positioning. As a result, their websites end up sounding interchangeable.
What Real Differentiation Looks Like
Here are some examples of true differentiators—not necessarily from printers’ websites, but from recent conversations with owners and GMs:
- Ability to turn a proof in 30 minutes or less.
- G7 qualification, FSC certification, industry awards.
- Carbon-neutral, ability to spec paper manufactured using wind power.
- Ability to truly handle everything under one roof (actually) so the customer only deals with a single vendor.
- Woman-, veteran-, or minority-owned business.
- Specific press sizes aimed at niche applications.
These are the types of specifics that speak to the needs and pain points of actual customers. But they are also differentiators that even the printers who claim them often fail to highlight on their websites.
How about you? If you were to take generic “quality, price, and customer service” off the table, what differentiators do you really have? If you can’t answer that question easily, it might be a topic for the next management meeting.
