Push products, not paper – Print21 magazine article

With calls for new campaigns to spread the message about the benefits of paper, it’s worth remembering that huge sums of money are already spent on paper promotion. Does it work and, if so, why? Tony Duncan looks at the current state of play in paper marketing.

It’s fairly natural that in a climate where demand is going backward, there is a call to find new marketing techniques to reverse the trend and encourage growth amongst consumers.

Not surprising that the clarion call to develop a campaign to promote paper is seen by many as a useful way of spending someone’s money - and in many ways it is an approach which is long overdue. The question is whether it is too long overdue, what sort of money is needed to make a dent in demand, and whether this is a good way of spending the industry’s (inevitably) money.

But before addressing these points, let’s also consider what is currently done in the paper arena.

Advertising spend in newspapers and magazines was approx $4 billion in 2008. While this was not spent directly advertising ‘paper’, it was spent on paper. Obviously for these advertisers, paper-based communications are still a viable medium to reach consumers. And while this figure is dropping as a percentage of overall spend, it is still a large number and will be for a while.

More directly, and advertising paper directly, the combined spends of the major copy paper brands is several million dollars a year. When combined with the follow-on advertising by their retailers, the figure will be somewhere between $5-$10 million, just to advertise paper.

In the tissue area, it is considerable greater, with spends by the manufacturers and brand owners combined probably close to $30 million promoting paper products.

Add to these figures the PR and marketing spend by Amcor, Visy and others promoting primarily (but not exclusively) paper packaging, and the newspaper owners promoting their printed products and we have a massive amount of money currently going into the promotion of paper, probably close to $1 million per week, an amount which in no way can be matched by an industry campaign. Likewise, every dollar any of these companies divert to an industry campaign would be a dollar they don’t use to promote their own products, and I’m not sure that would be a good idea.

What makes a winner
So is the marketing spend working for them? Not all the sectors are showing growth, but packaging, tissue and catalogues have shown consistent growth over many years.

My point is that consumers of paper products are not developing a massive anti-paper sentiment based on an environmental guilt complex. If they were, then we would see a backlash against all of the products above.

As an industry we need to understand why some paper products are winning against their competition and some are not.

And I don’t have the answer to that. My view is that the products that are winning the battle tend to be continually developed (innovative), focused in niches where barriers to entry can be developed, and fiercely price-competitive. They also tend to be in sectors that compete strongly with each other, as well as with non-paper competitors.

I spent some time in one of our major hospitals recently, and the amount of paper consumed every day there would make a paper manufacturer’s heart jump for joy. Not only many different types of tissues by the bucket-load, but printed and unprinted labels, all types of secondary and tertiary packaging - including paper/plastic substrates - and obviously patient notes as well (plus books, magazines and all the usual reading materials).

Probably the only area under medium term threat is the file/case notes, as getting them online, with a small touchscreen fixed to every bed, seems a more logical and efficient way of managing meds and observations. However, the long term prognosis for paper in these environments is, I would suggest, rosy. A point of interest though is that a supplier of tissues is often a supplier of non-paper wipes and other products.

So whichever way the industry decides to head in developing a campaign to promote itself, bear in mind:

* there are already millions of dollars being spent to promote paper (products),
* specific paper industry sectors continue to grow,
* a focus on the effectiveness and efficiency of paper over other materials appears to be a message that works, and
* the industry must continue to innovate.

Environmental credibility has to be there (which it is with high recovery rates, AFS, FSC, PEFC, ISO14000, Sustainable Green Print etc), and needs to be part of everyday business, but it is not the main message. The message should be about the products, not the substrate.
Watch what the successful paper product sectors are doing to promote their business; it seems to be working.