drupa blog # 1: manroland - the printer's friend

It's usual to come to drupa expecting to find new technology but it's not often that visitors also discover a new country, says Print 21 editor, Simon Enticknap.

As of today, the nations of the world are joined by a previously unknown dominion called manroland, home to the fabled manro tribe. No-one is quite sure where this new country is located; rather confusingly, its leader, Gerd Finkbeiner, claimed that it could be found in more than 100 countries globally, so it's possible that manroland is in fact more of a concept than an actual place, like Cloud Cuckoo Land, or perhaps a multi-site fantasy kingdom like Disneyland. We do know however that manroland has 9,000 inhabitants (also called employees) and that, far from being new, it is in fact 163 years old.

Seriously though, the new brand name and logo for manroland soon had editors and journalists grinding their teeth at the potential pitfalls of using an all lower case proper noun. How to use it at the start of a sentence for instance? Is that Manroland, which risks offending the brand guidelines, or does one stick with manroland and end up looking like an illiterate idiot (God forbid)? The fad of using all lower case lettering (thanks drupa) and stringing words together to form one word is a modern disease spread by branding and style gurus with no feeling for the everyday use of language, let alone regard for the poor old sub-editor. What if we all spoke like that? itwouldlookreallystupidwouldn'tit? As well as making it very hard to communicate. Knowing where to put the big letters and gaps between words may make writing more of a challenge, but it does have a purpose nonetheless.

So how much did manroland pay to come up with one word without those pesky capitals? Predictably, Gerd Finkbeiner wouldn't be drawn on an actual figure but he did point out that the last time MAN Roland changed its logo from a blue arch to a silver arch it cost the MAN Group €1.7 million. This time apparently it was achieved for a lot less. Mind you, all this is good news for the printing industry. As Thomas Hauser, head of corporate marketing and communications at manroland, pointed out, everybody working in manroland must now have their business cards reprinted. Nice work if you can get it.

They said what?
In which we examine the many wonderful and bizarre ways in which marketing-speak is able to transform the English language into ever more incomprehensible forms. This example comes from MAN, oops, manroland, which gave us this definition of one of its core values:

"Groundbreaking is who performs big."

True, it has a certain poetic resonance, and you might be forgiven for thinking that it is an example of loosely translated German into English, but not so. This is sloganeering done performed big.

And you can quote me ...
Markus Rall of manroland had a nice line in response to questions as to why the company had chosen to enter the small format market with the Roland 50. "Previously," he said, we were asked why don't you have it. Now we're asked why do you have it ..."

The Flash Drive
If you think print media is under threat, spare a thought for manufacturers of digital media (no, seriously). Not too many drupas ago, journalists were happy to receive copies of all press releases on floppy disks - so much easier for cutting and pasting (not that we would do such a thing). Even as recently as the last drupa, images and press releases were routinely supplied on CDs, but now both these forms of digital storage are regarded as passé if not downright obsolete. Today's PR digital media of choice is the flash drive. At a recent media event, I accumulated half a dozen of them from various companies, all with different designs and branding, so in the interests of keeping our readers up-to-date with current happenings in the digital world, I'll be keeping a running total of flash drives at this year's drupa. Oh, and any suggestions as to what to do with unwanted drives will be gratefully received.

Total to date: 1 - a very stylish stainless steel number from manroland (pictured).

(By the by, all the press and promotional material continues to be printed just as it always has, demonstrating perhaps that while types of digital storage media may come and go, paper just keeps rolling on.)

Stay tuned for further updates and adventures live from drupa.