Business News
Online Survey on Value Added Printing – PRINTplusX
Friday 25. April 2008 - As part of the joint "PRINTplusX" project presenting The Secrets of Value Added, the Fachverband Medienproduktioner e.V. (f:mp.) media marketing organisation and the PrintCity Alliance are offering the German speaking market an opportunity to take part in a scientific online survey.
High-end print finishing is indispensable for high-attention print products and an eye-catcher for consumers. The packaging industry would now be inconceivable without it, and it is a standard feature of direct mailings today.
Be it film laminating, embossing, varnishing or die-cutting, finishing technologies are subject to a constant development process. While solvent-based varnish and simple overprint varnish were used in the past, increasing use is today being made of dispersion and UV coatings of all kinds, including metal films or mother-of-pearl pigments, or as ultrasonically sealed functional coatings. Whereas die-cutting used to be a time-consuming operation on a platen press, a laser today does the job and permits line widths of less than 0.3 mm. The list is almost endless.
At any event, all these technologies have a common purpose, that of generating Added Value. This is very rarely of just a functional nature, but mainly focuses on influencing the consumer. Finishing triggers emotional reactions and memories. And that means its impact is often difficult to assess.
For many brand owners, it is therefore not just a question of which technologies are suitable for a particular print product for image advertising. It is important for them to have an idea of the payback benefit for their business versus the extra cost of “Value Added Printing” compared to simple four-colour printing. In other words, there is an urgent need for objective analysis that can be used to measure the impact of the Value Added Printing on the customer, and thus ultimately the Added Value of print finishing for the brand owner doing the advertising.
To answer this and many other questions, the PrintCity Alliance and Fachverband Medienproduktioner (f:mp.) have launched the “PRINTplusX” project in 2008. Jochen Wied, a student of Print Media Management at Stuttgart Media University (HdM), is currently writing an undergraduate paper in close collaboration with PrintCity and f:mp. One part of this paper is a survey on the subject of Value Added Printing, which is aimed at everyone who has to deal with print media in connection with their work – be it creative workers from advertising agencies, sales and production managers or general managers and project managers in printing businesses, management consultants, or also executives in the advertising, marketing and sales departments of sizeable brand owners in all sectors.
Initial survey results will be presented on the PrintCity stand 06/C46 and in the Print4Life Lounge (both at the PrintCity Plaza in Hall 6) at drupa in Düsseldorf (29.05. to 11.06.2008).
Following drupa this study will be the subject of road show presentations in Germany, plus the survey itself may be extended to other European markets & languages.