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Create your own competitive strategy
March 24, 2008

At the NAPL Top management conference last week we offered 30 minutes of free consulting with anyone on the consulting team. For four hours a day for two days we sat down with attendees and discussed a wide range of issues and subjects. As the digital technology and operations consultant you can imagine what I spent my time discussing.

One conversation that stands out was with a company that brought 3 staff members to talk about the competitive products and growth strategies. This company was a leader and had created a automated web to print ordering and offset printing business not unlike VistaPrint.

Many companies would be satisfied to sit back and work on incremental changes to the ordering or manufacturing process. But this was very forward thinking because this company was doing very well.

But as we see from our all the NAPL Leaders Studies, the leaders are constantly looking for better, faster, cheaper ways to manufacture as well as more value added opportunities. So when asked what they should do next, I told them the build a cheaper solution before your competition does. 

This gave them pause. Clearly this was not something they had remotely considered as evidenced by the pause in the conversation. After I let it sink in for a second I told them to imagine they were not the leader. Imagine they were trying to compete with the leader. How would you win business? How would steal market share?

You know that no one can compete with your cycle time or quality. What’s left? Manufacturing cost! Find a less expensive manufacturing process. Considering they were printing short runs, and make readies are the bane in the existence of short run offset printing, a digital press will almost alway win the short run price comparison.

If you created a web to print front end and combined it with a digital press, you would have a less expensive alternative. In other words create a competitive strategy, to yourself, before your competition does.

Posted by Howie Fenton on March 24, 2008 | Comments (0)