Blocking & tackling (again)

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dick Gorelick

In football, all the Xs and Os, all the 300-page playbooks and the exotic formations can be interesting, even dazzling. In politics, a candidate's credentials and ability to raise huge gobs of money can be impressive. In automobile engineering, the ability to activate music by specific artist simply through a voice command makes one wonder about other electronic marvels. In the graphic arts industry, we're bombarded with information about the latest, greatest technologies.

What does all this have in common? None of these developments has value unless it is accompanied by execution — the proverbial “blocking and tackling” — and, most important, competitive differentiation. Those who have been reading my columns for the past 25 years or so might be shaking their heads about another Gorelick column on this subject.

However, this is a subject that simply won't go away. It isn't to demean the importance of presses that run faster and better, folders that take less time to make ready, electronic proofing, color management, or sophisticated workflow. These are tools. The sad but true fact is that technology hasn't functioned as long-term differentiator, and it isn't likely to do so in the future. Good technology typically comes down in price, becomes widely adopted and no longer provides unique value to the marketplace. There are exceptions, but they are rare.

It all comes down to the fact that nothing an organization does — equipment, brand, organization, facility, size, notoriety, leadership, products, services, technological acumen — has significance unless it can be translated into unique, credible, meaningful value to a group of customers.

Why differentiate?

Perceived buyer commoditization of print grows by the day. That increases the importance of competitive differentiation. Adding to the urgency of addressing this issue is the fact that, with every customer assuming more of the burden of file preparation, with every customer that installs a digital high-resolution copier on its premises, the definition of “competitive” changes and broadens. Customers are becoming competitors and suppliers.

At the risk of being overly simplistic, most graphic arts companies are at one of three stages relative to the issue of competitive differentiation:

• The Disdainers

  These companies believe, or act as though they believe, that good product at a competitive price, delivered on time, wins (or should win). Competitive differentiation is addressed by a reminder of a long-standing association, tickets to a sporting event or a social relationship.

• The Unconscious Practitioners

  If it were possible to test all graphic arts companies and their accounts, we would find that many — if not most — print firms are seen as differentiated by their customers and aren't aware of it. There's an assumption that all is well as long as business is good. It is rare that a graphic arts company invests, on an ongoing basis, in research to understand the reason(s) its customers buy from it. Thus, there's no basis for duplicating success.

• The Conscious Practitioners

  Unfortunately, this category is grossly underpopulated. You don't hear much about these companies, although I suspect that they are more numerous than the conventional wisdom believes. These companies do not evaluate clients solely on the basis of sales volumes. Customer relationships are evaluated on the basis of mutual importance, an understanding of the value in the relationship, and market share within the account. They invest time and effort in understanding and anticipating customers' needs — which they consider opportunites, not obstacles.

Standard graphic arts accounting does not have line items for research, employee training and customer education. It's worthy of widespread industry incredulity, if not protest, when industry ratio studies have carried Customer Service costs as “General Factory Overhead” for many years because, as the source and compiler of the figures repeatedly explained to me, “If everyone in a printing company did his job, we wouldn't need customer service reps.”

It begs the question of the role of ownership and senior management in this environment in which print is an element in a multichannel marketing mix, print distribution costs are eclipsing print manufacturing costs, technology is becoming ubiquitous and affordable to the buying community, and the full-time print buyer is disappearing. A case can be made that the chief threat to the CEO or senior manager's effectiveness is to lose a sense of balance in the heat of battle — to become consumed or immersed in “getting the work out” at the expense of keeping an organized focused on the justification for the company's existence as defined by the marketplace.

It's not a new story, but I hope that this column has helped refocus on the core issue.

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Dick Gorelick is president of Gorelick & Associates and the Graphic Arts Sales Foundation. He can be reached at dickgorelick@gorelickandassociates.com.

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