TransPromo Now or Never? Are we talking to ourselves again?
admin | Jul 18, 2009 | Comments 2
Are you talking to yourself again?
I often wonder if we doing the Print Industry a disservice. We go to print centric trade shows and talk transpromo to the already converted. We tell everyone the time has come, the time is now – now go and be transpromo. But aside from best practices, customer testimonials, and the glorious color – where are the marketers? Are we talking to ourselves again?
Every once in a while, a white paper comes through my desk which discusses transpromo – but uses it differently. This refreshing Australian white paper positions transpromo as a way for marketers to test campaigns, concepts and ideas leveraging your trusted, and loyal existing customers. Nice touch. It’s this type of thought leadership that will position transpromo within the marketing community.
Filed Under: Transpromo
Lee!
Amen! Yes, we in the print industry are talking to ourselves, and we think that we are leading the way. In fact, I am in the middle of one of those world tours and once again learning that implementers are smart. I am finding TransPromo at every stop, but not usually by that name. My experience around the world has been that this idea of marrying marketing content to bills and statements has been in play since the 1990s. The printer folks who have made it happen did so with great cooperation among all of the departments in their customer organizations, and did it without giving it a name.
It’s really in the US where the marketers haven’t engaged.
The market in in Australia is an innovative one. I had a journalist there ask me if I really believed that Australia lead the world in TransPromo or if I was (more or less) just sucking up to the market.
I laughed. I’ve been showing the work of teams in Australia for four years. An Australian application won the FIRST BEST PRACTICES award in TransPromo from PODi. Yes, I believe they get it!
Cheers from Asia
Pat
I think we shouldn’t be too hard on printers or suppliers for talking to themselves. It’s natural that people listen to “people like them.”
In cable TV that’s the “echo chamber.” In the halls of government that’s “group think.” In corporate board rooms that’s “the way we do business.”
As Pat points out in her post, one of the greatest constraints on seeing what’s going on is when “people like us” is constrained by the blinders of the nation in which we live.
The most wonderful benefit of being a print addict is that the language of print has always transcended the dialects of national borders.
I’ve done press checks in Milan, Prague and Iceland. Hand signals + broken English do fine in dealing with the common problems of ink densities, ink/water balances and getting to good enough for a customer.
Unfailingly a connection is made on the basis of sharing a passion for getting a colorant on a substrate. The fact that new uses of database publishing and digital printing in Australia should not be surprising.
Australia is the closest English speaking tribe near Asia. Real innovation always happens at the borders. In some ways Australia/New Zealand is the Venice of the 21st century.