No Looking Back
Last week I had the opportunity to attend Dscoop5 in Dallas, TX which focused on the theme of "No Looking Back". Even though there was snow still lingering on the ground, inside the Gaylord Texan the conversations were certainly hot. More than 1,800 people—along with more than 90 participating vendors highlighting their products and services—converged in Dallas from all around the world (sessions were offered in several different languages).
It was really great to be able to chat with business owners and hear what they had to say about the industry and what they were thinking of doing to grow their business. The feeling at the conference was really optimistic and positive as business owners shared best practices and helped each other with business issues.
I also had the opportunity to tour Gigantic Color, a Dallas-based graphics shop dedicated to the large-format market. They handle the print demands for a large and diverse group of clients at the local, regional, and national levels. Troy McGinnis gave us a tour around the shop and answered a slew of questions from the group about everything from technical questions about the equipment to business questions. One of their latest projects was for the NBA All-Stars game. You can read more about it here: http://www.wide-formatimaging.com/web/online/Industry-NewsTrends/NBA-Transforms-Dallas-for-2010-NBA-All-Star-Game-/1$5569
A few things I gleaned from the conference:
- Spend more time with your best relationships, understanding their unique needs.
- Questions to ask your customers to better understand their needs:
- If you can fix/improve one thing about your business starting tomorrow, what would it be? Why?
- What would fixing or improving this do for your business?
- How long as this been an issue or opportunity?
- Who is helping you with this issue? How and is it working out?
- What is the cost of this issue or missed opportunity to your business?
- Analog pages have continued to decline as the shift to digital has accelerated.
- Analog pages are down 6.1%
- Digital BW pages are up 2.2%
- Digital color pages are up 22.8%
- 2007-2009 digital page growth (Indigo)
- Direct Mail 28%
- Marketing Collateral 48%
- Labels 77%
- Publications 107%
- Photo/Photo Specialty 177%
- Print is a $658 billion market; with 52 trillion pages printed in 2009.
- The industry is consolidating: there has been up to a 20 percent decline in number of establishments in developed countries since 2000.