This news story, which asks why printers aren't pushing personalised print more, put me in mind of a couple of recent conversations. One was with a transpromo expert, who was talking about a project where the client's customer information was held in no less than six different databases. The client company had been going for years, had acquired a variety of different businesses, and had ended up with a number of legacy systems running in parallel. In short, your basic nightmare in terms of pulling together the data needed for the sort of sophisticated transpromo campaign that was being envisaged.
The other conversation was with one of the directors of a relatively young etail business. I was interested to talk to him because the company has been set up from the outset using the latest ecommerce and database technology. To illustrate, while we were chatting in a bar at circa 11pm he was able to check on his iPhone all the real-time stats from the firm's website - the number of customers browsing online, the most viewed and most purchased lines, the number of orders through the checkouts etc etc. And all this customer information is in tip-top shape and in one place.
Naturally I couldn't resist asking him about whether the business used print as part of its marketing activities, as the interaction of print with digital media channels is becoming something of an obsession. It turned out that yes, they have a sort of "magalogue" that is sent to top customers. These top customers number less than 20,000, but they are high-value clients. He looked amazed when I pointed out that it would be possible to produce a personalised version of said magalogue that spoke to customers individually, and could include tailored content based on what they actually bought and liked. After all, he has all that information at his fingertips.
I was equally amazed that neither his current print supplier, nor indeed a prospective one, had alerted this company to the possibility already. Excuse the dreaded business jargon, but such a firm would appear to represent "low hanging fruit" and surely the perfect prospect for a digital printer with the right setup and the right mindset.
On the bright side, there must be many similar opportunities out there. On the not-so-bright side, it's something of a worry if print suppliers aren't grabbing them while they can.
