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Howie Fenton

You Must Be an Early Adopter to Succeed
June 19, 2008

Last year in this blog (10/8-10/9) I discussed the preliminary findings from the NAPL Digital Services Study. In that study and in this blog (10/17) we also discussed digital urban myths such as – “If you’re the first company to provide a service, you will gain immediate market share” and more likely succeed.

I discussed this myth in a recent newsletter. And soon after this newsletter was sent I received an email from a consultant who I will call Terry T. who believed that early adoption is essential for success. I thought I would share his colorful comments and my response.

"With an industry still with its head in the sand, telling any printer to wait only pours more fuel on bonehead thinking. Print is not competing with other printers. It is competing with content providers and alternative sources of information. From Wikipedia to MySpace, from digital magazines to blogs, a printer must be thinking differently to grow its entire offering. Investing early will drive a management to think where to capitalize on the investment and change its thinking to begin understanding where the customer may be looking for differentiation.

Fuji announces a digital sheet fed press and you worry about being first out of the box! If I have a 40" Heidelberg, I better be thinking early adoption. So what if competition comes into Shuttefly space or any early adoption business. Competition is what makes us better, not something to worry about.

Do you really think VistaPrint is not better for the competition from Staples, FedEx? Yet they were the first to merge the Web/print and capitalize on a segment with an overabundance of poorly run small printers still wondering if they should invest in digital! Look at their first
quarter growth vs. commercial print. Time to rethink your strategy."

Next time my response.

Posted by Howie Fenton on June 19, 2008 | Comments (1)

June 23, 2008
In response to: You Must Be an Early Adopter to Succeed
Richard Jais commented:

Early adoption of new technology is great as long as you've identified that your customers will benefit by using it and you have the technical expertise to market it to them. Many times there seems to be a learning curve to educate your customer base to understand the new technology and how it can benefit them. Once this step is accomplished you can then sell the service or product. Kelmscott was one of the early adopters of cross media campaigns by using "pURL's" and educating customers on the benefits of being able to track and measure responses was a very important part of the process. Taking the time to identify applications and then educating customers has been an important part of our success in being able to sell this service. Richard Jais rjais@kelmscottpress.com