Episode 43 - Simplify and Scale: The Promise of One-Stop Print-On-Demand

Hi there, and welcome to the Creative Operations Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Groom, and in this podcast, we'll be talking with creative operations leaders in all kinds of industries, from franchising to finance, from healthcare to hospitality and beyond. We'll be looking to uncover best practices and to see trends that are coming to help you keep your creative operations on brand and on budget at the same time. Enjoy.

Hey, welcome everybody to this episode of the Creative Operations Podcast 2.0. I'm your host, Kevin Grun, and today's a solo episode. So we're just going to spend a little bit of time talking about a topic that has become, I think, of elevated interest recently, and that is the state of the art in print-on-demand systems.

Now, if you've been around this world for a while, you know that print-on-demand goes way, way back, all the way back to the 1990s when we first began to see web-based print-on-demand systems first appearing and really helping to reduce costs and accelerate turnaround time for print orders of all different kinds of things. But in the past few years, we've really seen the level of sophistication around print-on-demand increase pretty dramatically. And it's basically focused that evolution has really been focused on three key themes.

One, flexibility for the user out there in the field. Two, control for the brand or the organization that is sponsoring the print on demand relationship. And then three, lots and lots of options in approval, in payment, in fulfillment. And also, I should say, in terms of options, vendor choice.

So that many brands today want to provide print-on-demand capabilities to their field marketing users without necessarily going to one print vendor alone. And what that means is that the state-of-the-art in print-on-demand is really beginning to move beyond just the notion of print alone. I thought what would be useful, given that vast range of topics, is to give you an example of a print-on-demand experience that I think captures what the state of the art is. Now, please know when I say state of the art, I don't mean something way out there and really advanced and something that you couldn't possibly do.

No, what I mean by state of the art is something that you could stand up and offer to your user community literally in a day or two. Set it up, configure it, and offer it to your users literally in a day or two. That's what I'm going to try to show you today. And to do that, I'm going to use my favorite system in print-on-demand, our demonstration system for our fictional brand called Three Beans Coffee.

And I'm showing you right now the home screen of that fictional brand community. So imagine, if you will, that you are a local entrepreneur, a franchisee of an organization called Three Beans Coffee, and you need to produce some materials to operate your business. And those materials and that transaction are going to be conducted under the authority of the master brand, Three Beans Coffee. So you're the franchisee, the Three Beans Coffee is your master brand, and it's bringing you this experience.

And the first thing you need to know is that your environment should have a lot more than just this or that piece of material. It should really be a one-stop shop of all the marketing needs that you have as a local entrepreneur. So everything that you might need to attract or train and recruit employees, to attract and win new customers, to run your business and comply with local regulations to the fullest extent possible, all that stuff should be in one place. And here's why.

You don have time to go to more than one place You don have time to be staring at a screen because you serving customers you motivating employees you engaging with your public You're not burying your head in a screen all day long. And yet, when you are here, you need to be able to get everything that you need done in one place. So here we are in an environment that can be configured literally in a matter of minutes, and they can have all the materials that the brand is trying to bring to you, the local entrepreneur.

I'm going to dive into that so you get a sense of what it should really look like. Here you can see a collection of marketing materials that I may need to use, a pitch deck that I might use to sell corporate customers on creating a relationship with our local coffee shop. If I'm a new store, everything that I need as a new store to really spin up my business and launch myself to the world, operational materials for everything that I might use day to day. And I might come back here once a week or once a month, but here's the thing.

I need to be able to find what I'm looking for in a matter of seconds. Because if I have to hunt and pack or I have to use search too much, the likelihood of my coming back to this tool begins to decline. Oh, and by the way, this isn't just about print-on-demand. It should be about everything that I need for the business.

Merchandise, apparel, signage, whatever it might be, this is the place where I should go with everything that I need. So when I hit operational materials, here you'll see we drive down to the template level. And one of the things about print-on-demand is we're talking less and less these days about static assets and more and more about customizable templates. Templating has been made popular to a certain extent by design tools that are available on the web, but here's the key in print-on-demand for brands.

Those templates have to enable document creation without creating a wild west environment where users can do whatever they darn please. So as an entrepreneur, as a local marketer, I see here a template that feels to me like it's in a design tool. But when I start clicking around, I only have the ability to edit certain things and I don't have the ability to change or move or in other ways alter the brand look and feel that I'm trying to support as a local franchisee. So here I am.

You'll notice that not only is my template locked down so that I can't move things, but my content has been made selectable, not editable. So let's say that I'm trying to create a business card for a new employee in my marketing department. All of the content is supplied to me by the brand so that I can choose it, but I can only change certain aspects of it. So let's say that I want to change Mr.

Hip's phone number here to 8999, and maybe I want to change his title, but I don't have the ability to just make up a title. I have to choose from appropriate options. All of this is driven by the brand, the brand level, so that as a local user, what I see almost instantly is a brand compliant and accurate piece of marketing material that's being created. All these controls, this framework that controls the freedom that I as a local marketer have, all of that is to be configured by the brand in today's print-on-demand systems, and it should be configurable in minutes, not hours or days, and certainly not with the requirement of any development team sitting in the background.

Now, as a local user, I may try to produce this document very quickly by hitting the finish button. And there you'll see that I have yet another aspect of print-on-demand, which is enforcing the requirement for me to change certain aspects of this template so that it truly is customized for local market needs. In this particular case I need to select a background visual for the second side of my business card So when I do I actually reaching into the digital asset management system for the brand That could be the onboard system for the local marketing portal or it could be a separate dam entirely, your choice.

So one of the things that you need to know about print-on-demand systems today is that they need to be API integrated with all manner of other marketing systems. So they need to be a part of the overall environment. They can't simply be standalone tools. Now, when I hit the finish button as a local marketer, because I've met all the requirements that the template has imposed on me, I'm able to actually click the finish button and now generate that asset that's critical to the print-on-demand process.

And that is a print-ready, CMYK, print-ready document in PDF format that's ready to be shipped to a press. And so the system is generating that document right now. And here's one of the options that you need to know. A print-on-demand system today should allow you as a brand to turn on or turn off an approval loop.

For the purposes of this demonstration, we've made this document generatable and submittable without having an approval loop turned on, but as a brand, you should always have the option to turn on approval so you can put an on on the work that a user is doing out there in the field before money gets spent reproducing that document, either in the hundreds or in the thousands or beyond. So here you can see because our approval has already been pre-configured to be automatic, I have the ability to download the document or to order it.

Since this is a print-on-demand discussion, let's go into the ordering process. And the thing that I want you to know here is a good print-on-demand system today is vendor agnostic. That means it allows you to use a vendor, a specific vendor, or to really bring in a vendor of your own. Sometimes you might stand up a print vendor relationship for a very short period of time.

In other cases, you might have a print vendor relationship that lasts for years or even decades. And the system should allow you to support anything from those two extremes and anything in between. So here you can see I'm choosing from quantity supported by this vendor in this particular case, and I am getting pricing that is negotiated by my brand and by the vendor so that I'm seeing favored pricing. This is one of the things about print-on-demand that makes it really popular with local users.

They're leveraging the buying power the brand overall without having to necessarily negotiate those prices themselves. So when I add this document to my cart, another option here, either being able to order on account, so I don't have to put my credit card dump, or to have a credit card capability right here, fully secure, Amazon easy credit card ordering. So you want to be able to offer both on account. So for instance, Let's say that I wanted to give my users the ability to use co-op funds for this purchase.

Here, I can select that new store account. And as a local marketer, I'm not spending my dollars. I'm spending the brand's dollars that have been set aside for me to make this flagship store's launch a true success. But in other cases, perhaps I'm about to invest my own funds.

That credit card option is there and available to me as well, so that if I'm putting my own cash at risk in the promotion of my local store, I can do so. As a brand, in today's print-on-demand systems, you want the option for both of those, both on-account and credit card billing. If I stick with my on-account order right now, so I don't have to put in all my credit card information here on screen, you'll see that we have now, the system should route this document into the right vendor's order workflow so that fulfillment can begin the moment an order has been submitted And just as I said that you should have as a brand the ability to approve creative you should also have the ability to turn on or turn off an approval loop for ordering as well That way, you can keep an eye if you need to on the use of co-op buttons, or you can turn off the approval loop if that would get in your way from a workflow perspective as a brand authority.

You need to have the options for that. And then finally, when it comes to pickup, these orders should appear in a place that your vendor or vendors, and you may have one, you may have a dozen. Each one of them should have a secure, reliable place to pick up their orders, either manually or with an API that integrates directly into their ticketing systems. And here's what that will do for you as a brand.

When you use the API alternatives, you can reduce the labor that's associated with order processing and thereby reduce the price that you're able to offer your local marketers out there in the field. And so that negotiating purchasing power that you have as a brand can be maximized by introducing efficiencies through API integrations. And then last point, as a print-on-demand system offers each local user a very easy tool at the local level, so it should give you, as a brand, control and reporting details instantaneously in real time so that you can look at all of your order activity by location, by user, by vendor, by template, or by any of a dozen different variables so that you can make sure that the market and material that's going on press and soon going out into the market is making sense, both for the local entrepreneur, the local marketer, be he or she a franchisee or a reseller or a dealer, and that it makes sense for you as a brand overall.

And that really, in sum, is the state of the art in print-on-demand tools today. A lot of what I've shown you is what Pike and I and Campaign Drive have been doing from the very beginning, But it has become smoother, faster, easier to configure than ever before. And if you don't have these tools that I've just covered here, it's likely that in the future you may find that your approach to print-on-demand pinches rather than enables the kind of marketing activity you want at the local level.

And then last point I'll make, and then let you all go for your lunch breaks. Print on demand and print itself has long been forecasted to decline as a percentage of the total marketing mix. That is indeed the case. That is indeed what has happened over the past decade or so.

We've seen it. But here's the thing. Print remains a durable part of the marketing mix for many brands, whether they are in technology or hospitality, as we see here, healthcare or wherever else, whatever other industry you might look at. So while print has declined, it remains a durable part of the marketing mix.

And that means you need to be able to support it and support it together with email and digital, HTML, animated banners, social media. All of those things need to be made accessible to your local marketers. Remember in that single stop kind of marketing portals so that they don't have to hunt and peck for what they're looking for. And they don't have to guess as to what's allowed and what's not allowed when they're doing their local marketing activities.

You've only got about five or six minutes a day with these folks, so you'll want to make those five or six minutes count. And serving them well in print is one of the best and most convincing ways to do that. Okay, that's enough for now. If you have any questions, I do hope you'll reach out to us at marketing at pike9.

com. Let us know. We'd love to show you what you can do with Grin On Demand today that might take you a little bit by surprise and really encourage you to think this through from a portal perspective. Thanks, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Creative Operations Podcast 2.

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