That’s no longer true. The arrival of internet, email and mobile phones were rude awakenings for the first child of the media. 

Like an only child, print has been outraged and confused by the arrival of its rivals. One minute it’s all cocky kid ‘we’re older and wiser, and bigger and better’, the next it’s a sullen teen ‘you don’t love me, you don’t care, I wish I was dead’. 

Following that initial anguish and the gut reaction to the arrival of challengers for scant attention, there’s been a period of reflection on how print can prove its powers and play to its strengths. 

There’s a growing body of research to quantify print’s performance, and it’s getting more sophisticated. A number of approaches can be taken to measure people’s reactions. These go beyond the relatively crude measurements of response rates to a mailing or the circulation of a newspaper or magazine to look at how print affects what we absorb, feel and do. 

Someone looking at how we absorb information is Kate Garland, senior lecturer at the Department of Psychology, Sociology and Social Work at University Campus Suffolk. Garland is an expert on the impact different media make on the uptake and understanding of information. 

First, let’s get the bad news out of the way. Her research shows that there is no real difference between screen and print-based media in terms of learning. The results of her research comparing reading material from a computer display and a book found that the medium made no difference. 

She repeated the work last year using more modern flat-panel computer displays and tablets to see if there was any difference and, again, found no difference between print and screen for uptake and recall. 

Print preference

While the data show that print offers no inherent advantage for recall, other aspects of Garland’s research show there is a preference for print, and that may be significant. 

“While educational institutions are ‘safe’ to provide learning materials via electronic formats, there is a need to acknowledge that one of the foremost requirements for quality learning is motivation, which may be impaired if learners’ preferred choice of formats for studying are ignored,” she says.

“There’s a preference for print for some tasks. My more recent research indicated electronic will not in itself impair learning, but that motivation due to liking print and the convenience of it may make a difference.”

So, the good news is that print is often preferred and, if so, that feeling can impact how we interact with a medium. Although the tactile nature of print is inherent, its importance wasn’t considered until digital media erected a, ahem, screen between the reader and the content.

“Prior to the advent of digital media everything was physical, you simply couldn’t have a conversation about the physicality of a thing because things just were what they were – it would be like trying to think and talk about walking or breathing,” says Tim Milne, managing director of Artomatic, a consultancy specialising in the strategic use of print.

“One of the fundamental purposes of the brain is movement,” says Milne. “In order to move around you need a subconscious physical map. Physicality is hard-wired; it’s been in our brains for billions of years. We’re designed to work in a physical environment.”

This highlights the importance of how physical touch is inextricably linked to our emotions. 

“Feeling is tactile and emotional,” says Milne. “It’s not one word with two meanings, they are one and the same. That’s how close the physical and the emotional are. The physical, the tactile, and the emotional – they affect the same parts of the brain at the same time. You can change how someone feels by giving them something to feel.”

It can be hard to talk about our feelings both tactile and emotional. One of the reasons for that is that because they are embedded so deeply in our minds they are difficult or even impossible to describe on a conscious or rational level. 

“You can ask people about their conscious reactions but when it comes to the subconscious they don’t know themselves, whereas looking at the reaction of the brain shows it very clearly,” says Heather Andrew, chief executive of Neuro Insight UK. 

Her firm carried out the neuro scientific research in Royal Mail MarketReach’s The Private Life of Mail report published at the start of the year. 

Perhaps the most startling finding was how big the disconnects between what we say and think and how we behave and feel are.

“Comparing the scans with an exit interview we found what people say isn’t the same as how they actually react,” says Andrew. “People who said they don’t open mail did. And brain responses of those who were most adamant that they didn’t open the mail had the strongest positive responses to mail.”

Could these results just be a  glitch? Not according to Andrew: “We measure brain response – it’s qualitative. We can’t read minds but we can identify the parts of the brain that are active.”

Participants were fitted with headsets – like a shower cap full of electrodes – that pick up the electrical signals from different parts of the brain. They then carried out three tasks: watched TV ads, opened mail and read emails, with the order randomised to check the priming effects.

In total 160 took part – a big cohort in neuroscience – and more than three times the 50 needed for robust results according to Andrew. Those results were analysed at a group level, in part because individual data is noisy and partly because it is deemed intrusive.  

The company looked at a number of measures of brain activity, including visual attention; emotional response, including the strength and whether it was positive or negative; engagement, a sign of the participants affinity and interest; and lastly long-term memory encoding, which indicates whether the viewer feels the message is important and interesting. 

The result was unexpected and an endorsement of print/mail.

“The response to mail was higher than anything else, mail is more powerful than TV or email,” she says. “Physical interaction makes a lot of difference, especially for memory encoding. Think of the way you remember entry codes and pin numbers by the movement.”

She adds that the Royal Mail research echoes findings in other print media: “We did research with News UK comparing a newspaper with an iPad. There was more interaction with the iPad – due to swiping. But the engagement was higher with the newspaper.”

Her conclusion is that: “Print can elicit a very strong response.”

Key message

Showing that print has a powerful impact on how we feel is an important message to share to ensure it gets a fair share of media budgets. However, there is also a desire to know whether it can also go a step further and influence behaviour. In most cases that means proving that someone has gone on to buy a product or service. The way that can be done is using a process called econometrics, and it’s something that has been done to used the efficacy of mail and print. As part of The Private Life of Mail report Royal Mail MarketReach used specialist firm BrandScience to analyse mail campaigns. Prior to that, print advocacy group Print Power asked BrandScience to conduct a broader analysis across all print channels. The firm carried out what is called meta-analysis – a study of studies. In this case it looked at the results of 500 campaigns for FMCG, goods and services clients across TV, radio, outdoor, online, cinema, newspaper, magazine, door drops and direct mail.

“All channels do research to promote their own market,” says Print Power Europe marketing manager Ulbe Jelluma. “Our meta-analysis covers all print-based channels – the results are clear and objective. What makes the study so important is that no one can say it’s too limited in scope. Based on the enormous amount of data in all these studies we can see the value of print advertising. 

As expected with a project of this size and scope the data gets extremely detailed but Jelluma says there was one key takeaway: “The current under-representation of print in the media plan. So therefore advertisers are losing out on ROI. The conclusion from Sally Dickerson, managing director at BrandScience, was that brands need to spend more on print.”

So overall, while print may not be able to prove that it can control our minds it certainly tugs on our heartstrings – and our purse strings, and you’d be stupid to ignore that. 

Royal Mail MarketReach research

The Private Life of Mail 

In February this year MarketReach, the Royal Mail division responsible for promoting direct mail published the results of an 18-month research project: The Private Life of Mail. 

This comprised eight separate strands including neuroscience carried out by Neuro Insight (see main feature for more detail), ROI/econometrics carried out by BrandScience, an analysis of 1,000 peer-reviewed academic publications on the psychology of touch, how tactility impacts the effectiveness of a mailing and ethnographic research into how people interacted with their mail.

Although the research was focused on the impact of direct mail many of the findings are also applicable for other print media. 

Response has been positive with more than 12,000 visits to the Mailmen website from where the research can be downloaded, as well as leading to MarketReach setting up more than a hundred meetings with clients and agencies.

“We have had a great response from the industry and a huge amount of interest,” says MarketReach managing director Jonathan Harman. “We are pleased the campaign has been so well received.”

Some of the results from the research showed mail (and arguably other print formats) performed even more strongly than expected.

“Whilst we expected mail to contribute to building brands by moving metrics such as emotional engagement, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that mail was the number one media in this regard, “ says Harman. “Results like this highlight the important role mail can play as part of the media mix.”

Printers can benefit from the Royal Mail’s investment in this research in a number of ways.

“All of our research is made available to mail producers and some have opted to cobrand it,” he says. “We also work closely with the Strategic Mailing Partnership and the Direct Marketing Association to ensure the research is distributed effectively.” 

Royal Mail is planning to launch an online mail training tool that will be made available to mail producers, clients and agencies.