Marketers will tell you that all campaigns should have a call to action. Take direct mail, for instance. A few months ago, Fergies’ Richard Sloan started collecting every bit of DM and marketing that came through his letterbox or fell out of a newspaper. Within a week, he had a stack of paper three inches thick.
This pile of print was its own call to action for Sloan. The new chief executive of the historic Brisbane printer corralled his sales team, pointing out the stack of print. “These print buyers have spent probably hundreds of thousands of dollars and they have no way of knowing whether it has been effective or not, other than their marketing people saying sales went up.” Maybe, said Sloan, there’s a better way.
While this line of thinking might be somewhat new, Fergies’ legacy is anything but. With a history that goes back to 1868, and now in its fourth generation, Fergies’ owners say they are proud to run the largest privately owned print company in Queensland.
The company has aimed to stay at the forefront of new technology. It has done this by sending a team of staff to every Ipex and Drupa to look at the latest trends and determine what is sustainable. This year, Fergies will send four members off to Ipex.
Investment roadmap
Fergies’ investment roadmap has been about more than just increasing capacity. Over the years, it has driven into new markets, such as accelerating a move into mail with plastic wrapping and inserting kit in 2000.
The same general route plan applied to digital, first with an investment in two HP Indigos on 2007. More recently, it took delivery of a Fuji Xerox Nuvera 120 EA to help grow the transactional side of the business.
“We’re winning some transactional print,” says Sloan. “The beauty of transactional print is you win the job once but print it 12 times a year.”
The Nuvera isn’t alone in churning out variable-data print. The Indigos are rolling out a mix of offset-replacement work as well as full-colour VDP. Behind the scenes, XMPie uDirect software allows Fergies to offer not just variable transactional but full transpromo.
“Our digital volumes are growing at quite a reasonable rate, in comparison to previous years,” says Sloan.
“And that’s allowing us to go out and target new markets.” However, he reckons its existing toolkit can punch harder. “We’ve got these software tools but we’re only using them to probably 2% of their capabilities.”
One of the biggest changes for the 140-year-old company is taking place right now. Fergies is gearing up to reinvent itself. This comes as chief financial officer Graham Liddle looks to retire this year and John Ferguson, managing director and standard-bearer for the family business, also prepares to loosen his grip on the reins.
“They’re looking for people with drive to reignite the business,” says Sloan. This is where he comes in, having taken on the chief exec mantle in October last year. Around the same time as Sloan came onboard, Damian Cooke was appointed sales and marketing manager.
Sloan readily admits he’s not a printer by trade. His background includes time in the IT industry, including a stint at Unisys and 11-and-a-half years with QM Technologies. (QM was purchased by Computershare in 2007).
Most recently, he spent over four years in a business process outsourcing role at Fuji Xerox. Sloan’s IT, data centre and online delivery credentials tie into the next stage of Fergies’ evolution. “We’re looking at ways we can reinvent ourselves in the market place, without losing sight of our heritage.
Why people print
“We’re trying to understand what people are printing and what they are trying to get print to do,” says Sloan. It all comes back to his three-inch stack of printed collateral. “These are the questions we’re trying to get customers to ask – are you using your marketing dollars in the best way possible?”
It’s not an easy question to answer. Measuring return on marketing investment is an inexact science. Sloan reckons “there aren’t enough calls to action in those documents so they can track what people are doing. They then don’t capture that information well enough to store it in their database to then do reactive campaigns after that.”
“What we’re trying to do is spend time trying to understand what the ultimate goal is for print buyers – who are trying to get their customers to do something.”
Sloan explains: “Every single business in the world is in business for two reasons: to retain existing customers and grow them or to find new customers. Every single marketing dollar is spent trying to achieve those two outcomes.
“So if you’re not measuring or tracking it, or you’re not taking information back from it, then you’re just wasting more and more money because you’re doing the same thing again and again,” he adds.
It’s not just about understanding Fergies’ customers, but the end user. The company has come up with the phrase ‘Fergies: connecting you with your customers’. “We’re just a conduit,” says Sloan.
Business reinvention
But let’s take a step back: why all this talk about “reinventing” the company? Sloan admits that it is still primarily a business geared around offset printing. That’s not going to change any time soon, is it?
“John, Graham and myself have all read a lot of different industry reports and analysts’ views,” he says.
“If you look at them all, they’re all saying that offset print is going to remain static or fall. The thing that the industry pundits can’t do is predict that rate of fall,” adds Sloan.
“So if you say ‘I’ve got a business geared around offset printing’ and try to extrapolate the future, your margins are going to get lower because the market gets more competitive and the amount of offset printing will reduce,” he adds.
“If you don’t look at some alternative streams of revenue, you’ll go broke. There are enough experts out there saying that if a printer just remains a printer, they will die.”
The drivers behind Fergies new direction are clear. The fight for offset work is getting ever fiercer, and the margins on that work are only getting thinner. Fergies isn’t alone in trying to
find a solution to this problem. But how exactly is the company going to put its plan into action?
The process has started internally. Sloan says Fergies is turning to suppliers and external consultants to help educate its staff, both from a sales perspective and on the production floor. Another way to improve the flow of work through the press hall is to improve the flow of communication, he adds.
“We’ve improved our communications channels so that production and sales teams are no longer seeing themselves as ‘us and them’.”
Fergies has also implemented several structural changes to make job tickets move more smoothly through the building. “We’ve created a customer service group, whereas before we didn’t have that. We’ve strengthened up our IT group,” he says, both in terms of headcount as well as reinforcing the importance of IT to sales and production staff.
The other side is getting the customers onboard. It is on the verge of relaunching its website to better reflect the new business strategy. Sloan says Fergies will be actively pushing its other communication services in addition to offset print, things such as more plastic wrapping, more mailing, more digital print and more electronic document delivery.
“This is primarily why we’ve embarked on skills development sessions,” he says, adding that Fergies has brought in a third-party company to assist with what he calls “solution selling”.
“It’s about getting the sales force to understand that customers will fall into one of a couple of groups. Some will say ‘you’re an offset printer and that’s all I want to use you for’ so we’ll be in that market place in their minds no matter what we do, and we’ll continue to supply them with offset print.
“But some customers are now starting to see us in a different light, as a communications solutions provider. And within that, they’re now starting to have discussion with us about how our other service offerings could assist them,” says Sloan.
One-stop shop
This could be selling the one-stop mailing shop offering, trying to convince customers not to turn to other suppliers for delivery. It could be digital print. Or it could be looking at other, perhaps electronic forms of delivery.
“The benefit is that they don’t have so many people to deal with in the supply chain. And people are trying to find lots of different ways to talk to their customers. So why do you have to go off to an SMS provider then go off to another ISP for an email broadcast then someone else to create personalised URLs?
“Why not just go to one location where you can do it all and have the documents distributed with the same look and feel in a physical format,” says Sloan.
The idea isn’t new. Over the past few years, many in the industry have started talking about rebranding printers as ‘print service providers’ or ‘marketing communications companies’.
So how is Sloan doing more than paying lip service to the idea of cross-media production?
“I think there are a lot of people saying they can offer this variety of different activities that we’re talking about, but I don’t think there are too many who are putting it together in one package. We have actually conceptualised it as a service called OneView. You can use one bit or the whole of OneView. It’s 1% to 100%. All our sales people have grasped the concept and are now starting to articulate this.”
The key thing for Fergies is that it wants to reposition itself without forgetting its legacy. But to continue to grow, it needs to expand its horizons. “We’ve set ourselves a target to double the size of the business over next five years. We won’t do that just in offset printing alone. We need to also deliver other areas of customer communications,” says Sloan.
Fergies has drawn up its roadmap to communicate this new vision, both to win customers and to make sure staff are along for the ride. Sloan’s job is to keep broadcasting his message and getting buy-in from everyone involved – it’s a call to action for Fergies.
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