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Calling yourself “Europe’s favourite print manager” is a bold and confident statement that requires a good deal of weight behind it or else it may come across as purely narcissistic. However, looking back at the contracts that HH Associates has signed over the past year, some worth an estimated £175m, this self-assurance seems justified.

A five-year deal with Carphone Warehouse, a £30m deal with hospitality giants Whitbread and a three-year deal with the BBC, outsourcing its print buying for the first time, are among HH’s successes over the past 12 months. Group marketing and sales director Tony Massey says: “We are living in an age of procurement where firms are looking to drive out unnecessary costs. Brands and how they are communicated are also essential to businesses today and we are very much a part of assisting firms with growing and changing marketing requirements.”

According to Massey, procurement changes over the past five to 10 years are linked predominantly to the demise of in-house manufacturing. “People are buying in print, not making it internally, and have to make the process as economical as possible.”

Outsourcing on the up
In the same manner, print buying itself is becoming more of a regularly outsourced service. “For some time, many larger firms have outsourced IT requirements and we have seen print working in very much the same way,” Massey says.

The BBC is a prime example of this trend and last October, HH took over managing much of its printed material. The BBC stated that this move was so it could “utilise buying power”.

When working with large corporations, Massey says HH aims to become an integral part of the marketing team. Account managers will work within a firm almost as a new recruit, often taking months to study how that particular firm works and build a service in line with them. “This way, we can get a real insight into the ethos and culture of a company and discover exactly what they want and how we can achieve it,” he explains.

This level of involvement has perhaps been the reason why large con­tracts such as the Carphone Warehouse deal have been extended and why HH has barely lost any major clients in the past five years. The only major contract lost was lost on price, “This was soon re-instated when the firm saw the level of service it received drop,” says Massey.

As many first-generation print management contracts come to an end, they do often change hands. “This has to make you wonder if print management is doing its job properly,” comments Massey. With such big outsourcing deals coming to the market in recent years, winning and, more importantly, retaining these contracts is integral to the future success of print management.

Delivering on promises
Massey cites two essential elements as key to his own company’s success in client loyalty. “Service and quality standards have to be extremely high, especially when you are dealing with high-profile commercial work. Then you must deliver on every promise you made to win the client in the first place, it is imperative to get this right.”

In the past four years, HH has moved on from predominantly domestic markets to growth across Europe as well as India and America. “The UK is very much a leader when it comes to print management and
we are trying to move the success we have had here to tangible operations all over Europe.” Some 40% of HH’s turnover now comes from overseas and, although it says its UK roots will remain a large part of the business, it wants to tackle print marketing issues that big firms are facing internationally.

A more global approach and the increasing trend to outsource print buying is one that HH has definitely taken full advantage of. “Love it or hate it, print management is undeniably growing and doing so on a global scale,” says Massey.