Time to Recalibrate Our Resolutions

While many of us might have difficulty keeping some of our personal New Year's resolutions (we saw you reaching for that second corn muffin this morning), we hope that business-oriented resolutions fare better (clean desk... again), especially the ones that really matter in business (better care of clients, better follow-through with prospects), as well as truly important personal resolutions such as more family time...

Our personal challenges with keeping resolutions should remind us that clients face the same types of challenges. Since commercial print, excluding published items like magazines and books, has traditionally been a sales and marketing tool, there's good reason to take a fresh look at what you produce through the eyes of your clients and prospects. That is, not by focusing on the physical characteristics of what we produce (run length, binding characteristics, etc.), but in terms of the results clients need to achieve with those printed pieces. I've often said that printers need to delve into why people print rather that what people print to really understand today's market. In these times, however, we need to go a step further. We need to create reasons to use print that deliver measurable ROI in effective ways. At the same time, we can take steps to demonstrate our awareness and understanding of the best way to implement total communications campaigns from a logistical perspective. For example, great customer service is meaningless to a small retail store that has a print job unless the establishment sees increases in sales or store traffic because of the print job.