“This has been a significant problem in our industry for decades now,” Perring told Printweek, “where price is seen as the only way to compete for new business.

“Our viewpoint is that in the long term, it’s just a race to the bottom: [competing on price alone] continues the cycle of price pressure and undercutting, and it’s part of the reason we see so many insolvencies. 

“If you cut prices down to nothing, you’re making very little margin on the job, and if there’s a shock, then you can’t cope anymore.”

Behind price, the other top differentiators were a printer’s relationship with the customer (18%), service (15%), and quality (11%).

The lack of emphasis on quality as the top differentiator for new clients surprised Matt Seaford, sales director of Midland Regional Printers (MRP), a family-run packaging and label specialist.

“Nobody wants to have something cheaper if it’s an inferior product,” he told Printweek.

“We’d typically see people pay a little bit more to make sure they have a quality product that represents them and their brand.”

According to Perring, however, the issue is that in many applications the minimum standard of print quality has risen so much that quality is no longer as useful a differentiator for printers.

“Whether it’s digital toner printing, wide-format inkjet printing or even high-volume inkjet printing now, quality really is now just a given, like it has been for litho for a long time” he said.

“The expectation of what can be produced is just so standardised now, with all the software and colour correction, and everything else in these presses, that you’d actually have to try quite hard not to produce a decent quality print job. The customer just expects that level of quality.

“Once you get to that next step up, really high-end stuff, then it becomes a factor – it becomes about special effects and finishes, and really reaching that next degree of quality.”

Seaford acknowledged that some companies might seek to price their print aggressively, but was more sceptical of the quality that might be achieved.

“People do often try to go very cheap to win the work,” he said.

“It’s not good – you can always get something for cheap, but then you find out why afterwards. It has shocked me that [the poll results] were so much about price.”

In his own experience in finding new work, reliability and standard of service was key.

“When I’m calling people, price isn’t always the thing they’re looking for. Sometimes they’ve been let down, or the quality isn’t there. Price may always be a factor, but it’s not everything.”

In fact, leveraging service as a key factor in winning work is print’s greatest opportunity to escape the “race to the bottom” mentality, according to Perring – without even having to necessarily compete directly with other printers.

“The members [of the IPIA] that we’re seeing grow are those who are selling consultative services,” he said.

“They’re making a lot of money from consultation, management, service delivery, and the print is just the mechanism through which they deliver that: they’ve got themselves out of competing on price.”

Perring added that many packaging printers – especially for food or FMCG – had worked this out long ago.

“The packaging printers clocked this model decades before commercial print. They will often provide huge amounts of creative and technical consultancy to their clients, because shelf appeal became one of the major sales differentiators from the late 1990s onwards.”

But while service received 15% of the votes, just 4% said that recommendations or reviews were the most important factor in winning work. Accreditations received less than 1% of the vote.

Lance Hill, CEO of Nottingham printer Eight Group, defended accreditations as an overlooked differentiator in a tough market – and vital for niche work like pharmaceutical print.

His firm has numerous ISO accreditations, including  ISO 45001, ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and qualified as a B-Corp certified printer in late 2023.

“For us, in our space, accreditations are very important,” he told Printweek.

“Of course there are some clients that just want a job done based on quality and price. But a large portion of our client base absolutely need to see that we have the right certifications, including pharmaceutical and big retail clients.

“We’ve just gone through the [ISO] audit and successful recertified for all the core quality, environmental, health and safety, data security and information security accreditations – those ones are a must for me.

“We are also a B-Corp, which aligns well with our values of doing things better and continuous improvement. While businesses might not see some accreditations as a big factor, I genuinely believe they do bring benefits, because they drive you on.”