The State of the Industry: How Data, Brand Experience and the Supply Chain Affect Our World

This article previously ran in the January/February 2022 issue of PS Magazine.

The story of the QR code serves as a metaphor for the state of the print and brand solutions industry.

Before the pandemic, the QR code was nearly forgotten. But when the pandemic hit, QR codes came alive. People saw them everywhere — on packaging, mailers and restaurant menus. The print and digital worlds were united like never before.

QR technology was made ubiquitous on smart devices with cameras. Brands could finally use QR codes and trust that customers would actually scan them, allowing the brands to better track and collect customer data.

The point of the story is simple: Things change quickly in this industry. Mere months ago, it was easy to stock paper. Now, that’s an arduous task. In the recent past, people aimed their phones at products simply to take pictures. Now and into the future, they can aim their phones at a product and receive a new stream of content via augmented reality.

Professionals must stay in tune with this ever-changing industry, as what once seemed like yesterday’s news can quickly become an essential part of the future, and vice versa.

As 2022 got into full swing, PS Magazine spoke with experts to better understand the industry’s present and future.  

Dark Days in the Supply Chain

Ted Corman saw the supply chain disaster coming. Corman, global accounts manager at Firehouse Image Center, says his company doubled its inventory months ago.

“Problem is that we’ve got record work in progress, and we burned through all that inventory,” Corman says. “We actually had the raw materials to get a bunch of work done. We thought it was going to last 180 days — it lasted 60. That’s created some issues.”

Firehouse, a large formatting digital printing company, is now contending with a market seemingly short on everything. And few want to honor contracted prices — in some cases, Corman says that suppliers have sent daily price changes. “There's a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” he says.

Corman has worked in the industry for 25 years and has seen supply chain issues, but never a disruption this big. The supply chain slowdown has affected almost every American. A survey by Oracle found that 45% of Americans never thought about how products arrived before the pandemic — now, 91% think about it often and 87% said that they’ve been impacted.

“The labor side is a mess, too,” Corman says. When the U.S. Labor Department released its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, it found that there were 10.4 million job openings in August, while 4.3 million people were leaving their jobs — that was the highest level seen on record in more than two decades. This makes it hard to keep good people employed. Recently, Corman says a good employee left before he had worked 90 days — bosses from his previous job doubled his pay.

Despite all the issues, Firehouse is staying alive. And he believes that others in the industry can too if they’re transparent and open to communication.

“The people who are who are having success is because of total transparency,” Corman says. “They’re telling their supplier, ‘This is what’s coming, please start finding this material.’ You’ve got to be an open book.”

An honest partnership amid a supply crisis means having hard conversations. Now, whenever Corman has a hard conversation with clients, he reminds them that life could be worse.

“My wife is a pediatric cancer nurse,” Corman says. “And I always tell my clients when they get frustrated: Neither one of us had to tell a parent that their kid had cancer or be the parent. This is print, take a deep breath.”

“Some people understand,” Corman says. “Some people get frustrated with me when I tell them that. But then they call next day and say, ‘I thought about what you said. Let's figure out how to make this happen.’”

5 Things Salespeople Must Know to Sell the Brand Experience

Packages — and how they’re sold — are stories, according to Doris Brown-McNally, HP’s worldwide brand innovation and partner development manager.

Brown-McNally recalls a time when she was asked to go with a client to showcase mosaic technology to an end user. The client wanted them to see how each individual package could look completely unique.

Brown-McNally knew that there were going to be 12 people in the meeting, so she and a designer recreated the client’s label, printed out 12 completely individual boxes and presented mosaic to the client via PowerPoint. When someone in the room wondered how good mosaic would look in the real world, Brown-McNally passed out the 12 individualized boxes to each person at the meeting.

“The conversation in the room changed,” Brown-McNally says. “Everybody is now playing with the box, folding it, and seeing the personalization. And they’re asking questions while they're doing it. At the end of the meeting, the sales manager said, ‘Could you do that 20 more times with 20 more salespeople?’ I told him my flight was in two hours, but now I’ve trained the trainer.”

Brown-McNally, who has more than 40 years of industry experience, says that there are many areas salespeople can train in to better sell the brand experience.  

1. Show clients your capabilities.

Marketing has a lot of turnover, so many people whom salespeople work with won’t know what technological capabilities you have at your disposal.

“The first thing I would say to a salesperson is you need to go back into all your clients right now — do Zoom meetings if you have to — and say, ‘It's been a while since I showed you our capabilities. Let me take you on a plant tour,’” Brown-McNally says.

The desires of clients also frequently change. Brands now want to be more sustainable, for example. “When was the last time you told your clients that your products were manufactured in a CO2 neutral environment at HP?” she says.

2. Teach by example.

Salespeople must always look for what campaigns catch their eye. What’s possible in print and digital? How can they bring those possibilities to clients?

“Many times, salespeople in our industry go in and say, ‘How are you doing? What do you have for me today?’” Brown-McNally says. “But I think what needs to happen is they need to become more inspiring and influential.”

3. Add value.

Salespeople must be confident enough to help their clients find a solution, even if it means bringing in another company. It’s a small industry, Brown-McNally says, and people remember who treated them well.

Often, adding value may simply be providing a client with helpful resources. For example, Brown-McNally says that Dscoop — a user-driven community of HP Graphic Technology owners — can bring together multiple organizations in partnership to help work on projects together. This may make a missing piece of technology, one needed for a campaign, easier to find.

When salespeople add value to clients, both sides succeed.

4. Keep learning.

Salespeople must keep learning so they can help clients in as many ways as possible.  

This means that companies should provide a wide array of training to salespeople — even on data and design software. But it also means that salespeople should ask a lot of questions of those with expertise at their own companies. Take your web guy out on sales calls — teach them something and allow them to teach you, too.

“The salesperson of today has to be far more competent across a number of different skill sets,” Brown-McNally says. “They have to understand design, they have to understand strategic business modeling, they have to understand reporting, they have to understand all the things that affect a brand relevant to the supply chain.”

5. Have passion and form relationships.

The days of the detached salesperson in the fancy suit and car are over, Brown-McNally believes. Now, she says that the best salespeople have passion for the industry and know how to form good relationships with a large network.

“If you’re in our industry, you’re doing it for more than just a salary,” she says. “You’re only going to be as successful as your passion.”

Securely Tracking Customers

In 2009, Scott Salvati noticed the rising potential of data.

Salvati, president of Lighthouse Marketing, saw how effective email campaigns were when coupled with marketing automation software. And when he was able to integrate direct mail into the process, his clients’ results got even better.

“That combination has always worked,” Salvati says. “That tie between a tangible piece of mail and email has been very effective as part of an ongoing drip campaign model.”

But since those early days of big data, Salvati says that data has become both more essential and more complex. There are new ways to track data, like QR codes, and new ways to appeal to customers, like remarketing campaigns — those are the ads that seem to follow you from websites to your inbox. There’s also now a greater ability for companies to know more about each customer by analyzing their data.

“It's one thing to have all these data points and another thing to interpret them and figure out what the data is telling you,” Salvati says. “Data is great, but by itself it does nothing.”

With clients, Salvati says it’s important to have a strategy that can be measured, ensuring that you and the client are on the same page. Those working on a brand’s campaign should be able to tell clients whether it’s driving growth. If not, what can they change?

Success looks different for every client, but Salvati says that an important ingredient to succeeding is getting prospects to reveal who they are.

“If you’re using a direct mail piece, for example, you may not have their email address,” he says. “But if you can get them onto your website and your calls to action are clear and engaging, you can get them interested enough to submit a form that gives that information. That’s a win, that’s success.”

Perhaps bigger than any advancement in technology is the growing need for security. While the U.S. hasn’t yet enacted data laws as strict as Europe, Salvati believes that day is coming. Those working with data must work from clean databases — only using addresses that they’ve earned organically — and stay in tune with any legal changes.

“Partner with somebody,” Salvati says. “One of the biggest mistakes you can do is try to do it by yourself and think you know everything. Things change all the time — that can burn you and you can lose clients in a hurry that way.”

You can be secure while still creatively collecting data, Salvati says, especially if you’ve organically grown your lists. Paid lists sometimes contain trap email addresses that can get those running the campaigns in trouble, which will harm your ability to help other clients. But those who can securely obtain and analyze data can help clients win big.

“You can have a text or an email sent when someone has visited a web page or submitted a form,” he says. “That allows you to put the personal touch on; to say, ‘Just checking in seeing how things are going.’ More often than not, they go, ‘I was just thinking about you.’ Well, yeah, we know that because we’ve been tracking you.”

Print and Digital: A Marriage into the Next Generation?

Austin Martin, a 26-year-old client experience director at Thumbprint, has seen myriad advancements in digital technology in his life. He’s seen big companies cut out on paper marketing, like magazines. But Martin still doesn’t believe that print will ever go out of style.

“We actually have a T-shirt that says, ‘print never died’ on a sign around a dinosaur’s neck,” Martin says. “I love wearing that one around. I don’t see print dying, not anytime soon.”

What Martin does see happening is a long marriage between print and digital. Many of Martin’s clients now commonly try to marry the two by using QR codes, for example, which he believes is the first of many steps toward deepening this relationship between print and digital. For one client, thumbprint integrated print and video, a project Martin loved working on.

“We had a physical print piece, a box with messaging all over it and a curated set of items for this event inside,” Martin says, “But we also had a digital message from the CEO and leaders of the company inviting people to an event through a QR code telling people to register. We pulled in all of the aspects of what we do.”

In the next many decades, Martin believes that the industry will become even more digitized. Much like QR codes became prevalent on packaging amid the pandemic, he believes that another big advancement — perhaps Near Field Communication (NFC) — will soon bring more vast change to the industry.

“If we can integrate digital into a physical print piece, which doesn’t require us to increase the footprint or cost, we can better get our client’s message out,” he says.

Martin believes that every creative in the industry must be learning more about technology and how it could serve clients. There’s plenty to learn, but there’s a mountain of data available to willing creatives. “There’s going to be a learning curve,” he says. “For traditional print people, this is a big shift.”

The next big industry evolution will be appealing to individual people over groups, Martin believes. Brands will better target individual consumers, which will change consumer expectations. Those creating a brand experience will have to get on board or be left behind.

“It might be a little bit more expensive,” Martin says. “But if I’m hitting home with exactly what this client would like rather than sending them some generic offer or gift, that’ll be huge. What are their personal desires and likes? Whether it’s music, art, history or whatever, we’ll be able to target a person where they’re at. I don't think it’s too far away. I really don’t.”

Hal Conick is a Chicago-based writer.