You Ask, I Answer: Advice for Print Companies in the Digital Age?

In today's episode, Mark asks, what advice do you have for partners like print companies to offer more value to brand owners? How do they stay relevant? Print is an interesting industry because for a long time people have regarded it as slow, inefficient, very costly, environmentally damaging, and out of step with the modern world, right? We're all on these devices all the time. We're running around connected.

We've got companies saying, hey, now we're going to slap a pair of goggles on your face and so on and so forth. And yet, print and direct mail in particular, print has a unique opportunity in the current environment. It is different. It is it is different and it is scarce. Take a moment and think about the contents of your postal inbox, the mailbox where physical mail gets dropped off at your house.

What's in it? Some bills, maybe. Even that kind of going away because uh paperless billing uh saves time and money for a lot of folks. Maybe some local flyers. Maybe you're one of the folks who still subscribes to like a paper newspaper, but not much.

It's a pretty empty place these days. Now, think about your digital inboxes, right? Not your not just your email inbox, but your DMs on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and TikTok and Twitter and so on and so on and so on and so on. There's so many mailboxes and they're all full. They're bursting at the seams.

That's all there's a lot of messaging. What happens when we are swamped by messaging? We ignore it, right? Mark all as red, archive this, delete, uh, inbox zero. We our tension in our electronic inboxes is scattered at best.

And again, it's across all these different systems. So that's even harder to figure out as to where should I be paying attention? And that's why print is an interesting opportunity. Because when you get something that is physical, is tangible, it's different, right? Take a book like Everybody Writes, or Jay Bears New The Time to Win.

These are print publications. A, they work without the internet, right? They work really well on things like planes, um, power outages and stuff. And you know, this is a I think Jay's it is really, really um powerful and clever because it's so small, right? It's it's valuable, it's it's a good read.

Uh I don't like the font inside, but that's just my personal preferences. Um, this is print, right? This is could even be direct mail. You could mail somebody these books. And Jay hands them out in a pack of three, one for you, one for uh someone you work with, and one to give away.

This is different. This is scarce, right? This is tangible in ways that that electronic communications are not. This is durable. When I turn off my computer, all my inboxes go off too.

I when I turn off the lights, this book still exists. I can't read it anymore, but it's still it still exists, right? It's still there. And it's this scarcity, it is this tangibility, this fungibility that is so interesting. It stands out.

More and more and more of our lives are becoming digital every single day. We now have conversations with AI, for example. So even our conversations are becoming digital in some ways. So as things go more digital, as more companies say, hey, let's save money by pushing our communications into digital format. What's tangible becomes more scarce and therefore more noticeable.

When someone hands you one of these, you go, huh, that's different. If I hand you another email, you're gonna go, is that different? Nope. Now this does not mean a return to sending out piles of crap junk mail, right? Nobody wants that either.

But if you took a high quality publication in tangible format and digital format and handed it out to people who would be interested in receiving it, I would wager, and I can't prove this, but I would wager that the tangible version would at least be remembered because it's different. It stands out, it's scarce. So we're talking about print publications that are highly tailored, highly focused, because this stuff is expensive, right? These things are not cheap. But think about books, glossy magazines, um, mailers that are truly innovative and creative.

You gotta watch your budget because again, the tangible things cost more because they they need to be made, right? They're not just piles of electrons. But when you reach the right people in your audience, it makes a difference. When you reach the right people in your audience, people show this off, right? Think about your favorite streamers on Twitch or YouTube or Instagram when they're when they're doing live streams.

When was the last time you had one that hold up like a tablet or did a screenshot and say, hey, look at this amazing email I got? I've never seen that. Certainly not on the any of the business of consumer streams. But do people hold up physical goods that they've received? Sure do.

They sure do. People love tangible items to show off. They can show this off. You can't do that with the digital good nearly as easily. Like, yeah, you could hold up your iPad and like, hey, here's this thing I got.

But the physical tangible goods are powerful because we instinctively, as as animals, recognize this is a thing that I can pick up and hold. I can smell it. Um, it's real in a way that digital communications are not. So that is the opportunity for print companies, for manufacturers, for 3D printers, all these different things. That's that's how they provide brand value and how they stay relevant by helping brands realize what is scarce, where attention is rich, but there's not a lot of competition, and then going to those places and bringing physical goods to those places.

So it's a good question. Uh, thanks for asking. We'll talk to you next time. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.