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In this issue we take a look at the changing face of competition in the quick and small commercial printing industry. Are online printers and office superstores competitive threats? Probably, if your business is built around the products that they provide. Probably not, if commodity printing is not your game. The trick is to realize that they are changing the game and react accordingly.
I'm certain that in the early part of the last century there were companies which prided themselves on making the best buggy whips and carriages. Some kept plugging away, never imagining that horses would soon be obsolete in the transportation business. Others saw change coming and adapted. That little tag in General Motors vehicles that says Body by Fisher can trace its roots back to a horse-drawn carriage shop in Norwalk, OH. Today Fisher Body is a division of GM.
However, GM has had its own problems recognizing the need to change. Back in the 1950s, kids could name almost every car on the road and 99% of the cars were made in America. Back then, GM accounted for 60% of the car market and could pretty much control the price, quality, and features of every one of its brands. Then came the little VW Beetle and, soon after, the tiny Honda. Today, Oldsmobile has disappeared and GM has posted its largest loss in its 100 year history. What went wrong? GM thought the world would never change and continued to produce clunky, expensive, shoddy road hogs. It got blindsided by smaller, nimbler, and higher quality imports.
The point? Every industry has to adapt in order to survive. That includes the communications industry, of which we all are a part. As an industry (and as a magazine) we've gone from waxers to websites in less than 20 years. Those printers who adapted to continuing changes are still in business. Those who didn't are not. I am reminded of a note sent to me several years ago by a printer who was incensed that the weekly newsletter I produce is distributed by facsimile. How dare someone involved in the printing industry use this competing technology? The irony was that he sent the note via email.
Technology is one of the most powerful change agents. It has driven the music industry from wax cylinders to vinyl disks to tapes to CDs to Internet downloads. What has stayed the same is music. It has changed our industry from letterpress to offset to digital but the heart of the industry is still marks on substrates. The change has come in the way those marks are created and produced. What has stayed the same is the necessity of finding the needs of our customers and meeting them.
As English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said: "The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
How do you beat these new competitors? The same way you beat a chess grandmaster. Play him at any game but chess.
author: by Bob Hall