Breakthrough: Expo Visitors Came Prepared

My spirit certainly was heartened by extensive reports from exhibitor personnel and show managers that visitors to Graph Expo and Converting Expo last month in Chicago came well prepared for serious discussions about adding capabilities, exploring new services and/or investing in equipment.

Readers might recall that on this page last month I had railed about floundering printers, trapped along with their fewer counterparts in a seemingly irreversible downward spiral of price and margin, who nonetheless keep thinking about their business success wholly in terms of equipment, products and similarities with other printers, rather than capabilities, services and the benefits of differentiation.

But as those show-floor reports contend, more printers than normal arrived at McCormick Place with spec sheets, shopping lists and serious inquiries about the price and value of the wares and services on display. Surely, it's too soon to declare an end to the tire-kicker era, but we can hope; at the very least, we can call this a breakthrough in how printers attend this important annual show.

I made many other observations during North America's single biggest printing event of the year, and I was fascinated to see some common trends emerge to shape the industry. Quite a few exhibitors, for example, used the somewhat clunky term "decommoditizing print" as a worthy goal.

Granted, many exhibitors' marketing representatives use this term to describe the main attractions of digital imaging technology, since these systems are designed to customize, personalize and target messaging. But decommoditizing print legitimately also refers to many other advantageous capabilities on display at Graph Expo, from special printing effects and UV printing and coating to affordable postpress systems that allow diecutting, perforating and gluing in line.

It's not surprising that inkjet technology earned a lot of notoriety at this show, much of it from industry observers; in fact, I suspect that more interest in inkjet came from observers than from prospective buyers. How to explain? I think simply that technological advances in inkjet are piquing everybody's interest, more so than are the benefits of real adoption and specific applications of this technology by mainstream printers.

Another factor at work with regard to inkjet is the quiet yet substantive advances in sheetfed offset—from metal and polyester computer-to-plate systems to CTP using conventional plates and the continuing improvement of on-press automation systems. It's not surprising when established printers, opting for productivity benefits and competitive advantage, are drawn toward the familiar rather than the unfamiliar.

It appears that these established printers feel they're seriously invested in sheetfed offset, much more than in toner-based technology, and need to pursue all of the promised advantages in ink on paper before they choose to explore new capabilities and applications derived from new and different non-contact imaging technologies.

Equally fascinating for me was watching trends among the exhibiting companies, particularly how they're dealing with continued depression in capital equipment purchasing. Virtually all the manufacturers are promoting the benefits of a JDF-enabled workflow for printers, and open architecture and CIM (computer-integrated manufacturing) are the bywords today (is anyone these days owning up to having a proprietary system?).

Yes, I understand that a digital workflow and a CIM solution are crucial to the longer-term success of printing companies. But given the industry's poor business conditions right now, I'd say that printing managers should spend at least as much time on improving client sales and developing prospective buyers of print media. Maybe that's where the next big breakthrough ought to come.

rynostroza@reedbusiness.com