Corner The Marketing Work
by Bob Neubauer
When you look at the items that won Best of Show in the In-Print contest over the years, you quickly see that most of them have been marketing materials.
Boeing won Best of Show this year with a marketing booklet designed to entice people to buy a jet. Last year, Safeco won with a marketing package tempting agents with a free conference they could attend if they worked hard enough to qualify.
This makes perfect sense: Organizations demand the highest quality from their marketing pieces, so these jobs are naturally the top candidates for prizes.
But not every in-plant prints its parent organization's marketing pieces. If you are one of those that don't, you would probably tell me that your shop only prints the company's two-color work, and the marketing folks always send their work to outside printers. That's just the way it's always been.
It doesn't have to continue this way, though.
The pages of IPG have been full of stories about managers who took the initiative to go after their organization's marketing work. They started out offering to print small jobs, sometimes at no cost. Gradually they got the marketing folks to realize the in-plant was just as good as any commercial printer.
That's what happened at Boeing. Its marketing department didn't always send its work to the in-plant. The shop had to start with small jobs and, over time, convince the marketing department it could handle the work.
It's not just the large in-plants that are doing this either. Mellon Bank's eight-employee shop produces many of the company's marketing materials, but this only started after Manager Mike Renn made numerous visits to the marketing department to solicit work. Even the two-employee in-plant at Sunkist Growers prints marketing work. It's all a matter of taking action.
So start today. Compile data on outside print costs. Then pay a visit to your marketing department. Even if you seem to have plenty of work at the moment, some of that work is bound to dry up as documents move to the Internet. Marketing materials, on the other hand, will likely be around for years to come. Why shouldn't you be printing them?
Besides, think of your operators. They've got talent. Don't they deserve the chance to improve their skills and take on new challenges?
Countless in-plants have proven they are capable of producing their organizations' marketing materials.
What's holding you back?