Letters, feedback, get it off your chest: 11 November 2009
Catalogues and their offspring get the readers thinking this week. What’s your view? Write in and have your say on this, or any of our other stories.
Re: No let up for letterboxes: Print21 magazine article
There are many lessons still to learnt by both retailers and printers in the country in understanding that just putting the printed version of a catalogue on the web and indexing the content to enable searching is missing the opportunities that exist when print and online are considered as one.
Print still has the advantage of being able to capture the attention of buyers (I refer to a recent article from the Wall Street journal: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB125565110691488935-lMyQjAxMDI5NTI1NjYyNTYxWj.html ) Understanding that online and print can and should co-exist, rather than the view of most printers that the web is a competitor would assist in creating online sites that can lead clients to, from the printed medium.
Using QR-type barcodes within the printed pages can link the reader to additional information about products without having to key in lengthy URLs. Not only providing the client with useful information that due to "real-estate" limitations with print that can be shown in the web, which has no such limitations, but crucially providing the retailer / printer with mechanisms to capture responses from the printed material. As the URL can be unique meaning that any visitor to the site would of only come from reading the catalogue. This in itself is something that retailers have forever been requesting from the catalogue producers.
The current collection of sites such as Lasso, Webcentral etc produce a result; however when one looks at how these are achieved it is the wrong way around. That is these sites take the final PDF used for print and utilise the two weeks between printing and letterbox distribution in "reverse engineering" the content to place on the web.
Ideally, the content should be separate from the artwork and maintained within a Product Information Management (PIM) This is something that I spent many years with limited success trying to convince retailers they need to integrate their merchandising systems with to enable content to "flow" to any medium rather than the islands of automation that currently exists. This way the content can be easily deployed for the web and print – creating a "single source of truth".
This is just one way that print and the web can work together. Other ways are using the print to point to greater information such as colour-ways using rich internet technologies such as Scene7 (now an Adobe company) Many progressive overseas retailers have embraced these techniques.
In short, just presenting the view that placing the printed page online is going to protect the printed catalogue is not the future. Embracing the web and print as one is.
Steve Smith
There's nothing new under the sun.
Several decades ago I worked in London for a firm of publishers that had been, a century earlier, a firm of chemists whose founders had started to add news and information to their catalogues to ensure that they were read. Those catalogues became the world's first trade magazines, The Chemist and Druggist and The Ironmonger. As they became successful in their own right, they split into the company which became Morgan Crucible and the one which became Morgan Brothers Publishers.
When I started work for them on The Ironmonger in the centenary year as publishers, they set a high standard with an editorial staff of around eleven, a supplements department with another two or three (I worked for that section for a while and wrote a 64-page guide to glues and adhesives - exciting stuff!) and an inquiry department with five people fulltime answering phone and mail questions. It was definitely profitable and as a young reporter I was sent UK-wide reporting on the meetings of hardware retailers and ironmongers. When John Betjeman (later appointed Poet Laureate by Queen Elizabeth II) called for some information in order to open an exhibition of Opercula (perhaps better known as "coal hole covers" those often ornate cast iron plates set in footpaths in front of houses above the coal cellars) I was told to find the booklet on that subject we had published long before, try to find some updated information and arrange to meet him before the event and then report on the opening. It took many hours and resulted in about a 6-inch story.
But that was the way things were in those profitable days. Maybe some of the "new" catalogues with news will do as well.
Gordon Woolf
I'm interested in some compelling stories about the situation most print industry workers find themselves in at the moment.
A recruitment officer told me that print trade people are leaving the industry in droves and changing career paths. What does this say about the future for an industry worker? Will it be good times or bad?
Is the print industry going to slide with poor quality output from less fulltime staff and more (non accountable) casual staff?
I think most of your readers are employees and enjoy your informative news and wish for some juicy articles. What about exposing some cons and shonky bits instead of trying to gloss over the whole print industry with happy, warm-and-cuddley stories.
Let’s see some stories that make us think instead of stories that just read as a who's who and whatsie did this. I like most of your articles but there is not much in the way of variety.
Keep up the good work.
iGenxprt
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Re: Brussels sprouts labels: Print21 magazine article
That’s got to be one of your better headlines. It got my attention and I hate brussel sprouts!
Bill Wall