RIP print?

I sort of thought all of this “Print is Dead” talk ended in the early 2000’s…But I stumbled on the Demise of Print Blog today. According to the About page, this site doesn’t celebrate or mourn the loss of print, it’s merely a documentation.

I’m not sure what it’s describing really illustrates the loss of print. Certainly when the internet exploded there was a major shift online. Most marketing poured into email campaigns because of ease of use and cost issues and many publications went unprinted.

It became quickly clear that this strategy alone wasn’t going to work. It’s been proven over and over that an integrated campaign is your best bet and specifically that print to web works. A typical example I think about a lot is with catalogues. I like to thumb a real live catalogue, but I’ll go order online. I think most women (this is empirical evidence at best) would agree. When you stop mailing the catalogue to me, I forget all about you.

Print and mail are still very viable. People still see mail as “important” in a way they don’t view email. Computers in general give people a short attention span and the mindset you enter when you go online is one of “hurry up”. People still stop and take a minute to review the mail.

Print has definitely changed and maybe even “gotten smarter”. Targeted data driven pieces that truly speak to your constituency has replaced the shotgun method of crossing your fingers and hoping you get 2%. Certainly people don’t have to print 25,000 brochures just to throw out 10,000 of them anymore. Things have tightened up and that’s not a bad thing.

The print industry has obviously changed dramatically -marketing in general has-but it’s only shifted. It hasn’t died.

Why make it so hard?

With all this Penelope Burk talk I appreciated this recent post from Seth Godin.  He makes a great point here. 

So often in both the business and non profit worlds we get bogged down in what’s easier for our system and not what makes it easiest to buy from us. 

 A little while back, Spike at Brains on Fire told a great story about being helped in NYC by a concierge at a hotel where they weren’t even staying.  That is exactly the kind of thing that stays with a person.  They might not have stayed at that hotel that trip,  but I betcha that they will be quick to stay at that hotel in the future.

 It makes good business sense to think of the donor/customer first and make it easy to buy from you (or give to you).  Ultmately the customer doesn’t care how great you are.  They care about what you’re doing for them.