For an industry that traditionally based itself on relationships between printers and their customers, a lot has changed in commercial printing in Australia. The contemporary scene is populated by a growing number of “unconventional” business models, including “print brokerage” and “print management”.
In an increasingly impersonal industry, not knowing your customer’s face — or sharing a joke or anecdote, or a beer — seems to be becoming the default setting for midsized commercial printers. “Relationship” printing, with all the inherent loyalties of customer relationships, is fast fading, particularly at a time of economic uncertainty, when price margins, even narrow ones, can win the day over perceptions of quality or even over the reassuring rhythm of habit.
“But we’ve always gone to Fred…” sounds more and more an old-fashioned way of buying print. As the economic mire deepens throughout this year and perhaps 2010, some print businesses are reducing their sales forces and introducing web-based ordering. Others are vying for brokered print work or contracts from management companies.
Who are print managers?
Reselling, where an agent will buy and onsell an order to a printer, with their own margin built in, is becoming commonplace in Australia, notes John Corrigan, administration manager of Focus Press in Sydney. But print management, where a fixed fee is added to the job for the service of securing the best printer, is as yet little known outside Australia’s major league of print.
Print management, says Corrigan, is not just about creating a go-between, but has taken on a facility management role under which staff are located in a corporate client’s operations, either representing a printing company or sourcing a range of service providers, including printers — project-by-project or on a fixed-term contract.
Typical print management projects
Certain types of work tend to be offered to printers through management contracts.
Corporate contracts outsourced to commercial printers are more likely to be high-volume runs of commercial work — flyers and brochures — that require little monitoring from outside of the print business doing the work. Design-heavy projects tend not to be print managed because the designer usually has a firm idea of what should emerge, but as a printer, it is trickier to produce that through a third party.
Big end of town
Blue Star has been running a print management model for about ten years, and has acquired further acumen in this field through its acquisition of McMillan, and it now brands its management service as Blue Star IQ. Print management is one of four components to Blue Star’s business, alongside web directories and publications, digital and sheetfed printing and direct mail, and it accounts for around a fifth of the company’s revenue.
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