Bowden Print Group in Adelaide was established in 1935 by Frederick Bowden, and is still owned by the Bowden family. CEO Damien Burchell started as admin manager 25 years ago and worked up to CEO, a position he has held for four years, with two fourth-generation Bowdens now in the business. 

 

During that time the business has evolved significantly. Offset print is still its core activity with 60 per cent of work going onto its litho presses, and the company has been in digital printing for the best part of a decade. However the last few years have seen the company make a major move into multi-channel marketing services. 

 

Team Bowden all share an unshakeable belief in continuous improvement and evolving the business to meet and exceed clients’ needs, and these days Bowden is one of the new breed of pioneering print businesses that are offering their clients a 

multi-channel marketing service.

 

Burchell says the company has a clear strategy to become a marketing services provider and not just a printer, and has built a strong business case for it. He says, “We wanted to enter new growth market, and we knew we could build this around existing clients, and develop vertical markets.”

Most clients that the company has won in its multi-channel tack have been direct clients, rather has agencies.

 

Burchell says, “Agencies tended to think we were stepping on their turf, so with them we only operate as an infra-structure supplier, in other words we provide the means for their message to get out there in an integrated way.”

 

That integration includes the full multi-channel gamut, with print, email, sms, purl, QR codes and the like. This is all propogated under the Bowden XM2 brand. According to the company the Bowden XM2 solution uses impactful and creative print coupled with purl technology, creating personalised messages aimed to be relevant to each recipient, and says Bowden has the ability to return higher response results than a regular printed campaign. Preferably, in a cross-media campaign, the print piece is linked to other media, such as web and mobile.

 

Monitoring and measurement is a key feature, and with detailed summaries on who has responded to the message or call to action, and who has visited websites, the tracking reports capture additional information to help its clients tailor products and services for the next campaign.

The Bowden software enables clients to analyse response data from a marketing dashboard to help identify what parts of the cross-media campaign are working, and what parts are not. Burchell says, “Tracking and measurement gives us tools to figure out just the right combination that will maximise the return on marketing investment.”

 

Bowden does aim to be proactive with direct clients, although has had mixed response, but again is more than happy to take on the role of the services provider, providing the architecture for the message to be delivered. Burchell says, “We can sell both the idea and 

the infrastructure or just the infra-structure.”

 

It has not been an easy run for Bowden as it has attempted to break into this whole new market and work back up the chain. Printers are used to being order taking manufacturers, to get involved upstream is a different world. Burchell says, “We can take people to the door, but we cannot open it for them, that is up to them, we are not a marketing company.”

 

The company also offers its clients customised Web2Print solutions that are built from the ground up, where the client has full control over the layout, flow, GUI, and purchasing capabilities in the web store. 

 

Setting up as a cross channel media supplier takes a fair bit of doing, Bowden used a combination of retraining some of its existing 30 staff and employing specialists, the whole process went fairly smoothly, Burchell says, “It wasn’t really a problem to find the right people, both from within Bowden and outside it.”

 

Bowden is currently refining the business proposition with a view to repositioning. Burchell says, “Gaining traction is the key to exploiting new markets, whatever they are, and cross media is no different. Cross channel marketing is ultimately about lead generation for sales. We are living in a fast moving world, and we need to ensure that we are providing the optimum service that exploits the latest tools to provide an engaging interactive message platform.”

 

One stop shop

Part of the Bowden strategy is to be a one stop shop from design through to dispatch. Damien Burchell says, “By having everything in house we are in control of both the scheduling and the quality.” That commitment to quality has seen the company awarded ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

Its main print production kit is a Heidelberg CD74-5 and an SM52-2. Along with Bowden’s A2 and A3 offset presses the company also has two colour digital printers, a Fuji Xerox 1000 and Versant 2100, along with Fuji Xerox Nuvera and 4127 black and white printers.

 

Burchell says, “We operate with a hybrid workflow and split the work according to its optimum productivity. For instance we may have a run of A3 posters, which according to number could go on either offset or digital. Our clients are still focused on how the job is printed, it is about understanding the end use of the printed piece. The client is still interested but the question we ask is strategy versus outcome.” 

 

Bowden puts out a helpful flyer to its clients, which outlines the benefits of offset and digital. The inside spread is half digital half offset, with only aficionados able to tell the difference, while the text outlines the differences when it comes to quantity, printing medium, colours, turnaround, proofing and customisation. 

 

Digital printing has been part of the Bowden operation for the past decade. As everyone knows relations between printers and their digital equipment suppliers can be complex, with printers often feeling they are on the back foot, despite being the buyer. However Burchell says, “We go into negotiations knowing that we hold the cards, and that we are not beholden to anyone.” Digital now makes 40 per cent of revenue at Bowden. 

 

Overall the company continues to grow, with last year’s numbers topping the year before, and this year’s forecast to rise again. However Burchell says, “There is little new business in Adelaide, so our growth tends to come at the expense of someone else, so it is a job or client that is recycling, if we have won it that generally means someone else has lost it, I would say that would be the case 95 per cent of the time.”

 

Of course there have been a couple of high profile collapses in Adelaide over the last 12 months, Burchell says not only have they taken some capacity out, they have also resulted in prices lifting, he says, “We have had buyers come to us and say so and so used to print my job for this much, can you do the same, and we say so and so actually went bust, mainly because their prices were too low, so no, we cannot print for the same price otherwise we would go broke as well. Fortunately it seems most printers in Adelaide are also giving the same response, so we have seen sell prices rise in the last few months.”

 

Bowden Print Group is clearly taking the bull by the horns, recognising that it cannot stand still, and cannot run on a business proposition it may have in the past. 

 

The world is rapidly changing, the opportunities for business and organisations to communicate through multiple platforms is on us, and Bowden is determined to be positioned to serve the needs of the modern day market.