Optimism about the Future of Print Highlighted by Printers in Survey

In a recent survey of 485 members of Xerox’s Premier Partners Global Network, conducted with GMC Analytics, more than 70 percent of printers said they are optimistic about the future, believing that print will always be part of the communications mix, but do agree volumes will still decline. The printers also feel that the recession continues to be less of a negative factor than in previous years – 65 percent of respondents agree that the impact of the recession is making investment difficult, notably down from a high of 73 percent in 2010.
Among the opportunities for new or increased revenue, more than one-third (38 percent) of the printers still expect a significant increase in revenue through direct marketing, pointing to a continued need for a balanced marketing mix that includes direct mail. Other opportunities ranked as follows:

• Packaging and Photo specialty products – 18 percent each
• TransPromo – 16 percent
• Book publishing – 12 percent

So what should printers do? The fear of going out of business with traditional services (77 percent) continues to have a strong impact and many are looking for new value-added services to differentiate their portfolio through offerings such as web-to-print services (74 percent).  Another priority area for printers differentiating their business is to continue transforming into an overall marketing service provider (50 percent) which jumped from a low of 36 percent in 2011.
Listening to customers is also extremely important in figuring out which direction to go, and the majority of partners reported increased demand in certain areas – those being full-color variable data printing (76 percent), online ordering/web-to-print services (64 percent) and wide-format printing (48 percent) during the past year.
Check out the accompanying infographic we created highlighting the key stats mentioned above and more.
What is your response to these survey results? What is your experience? Are you optimistic about the future of print? Where do you see the greatest potential moving forward?