There has been much criticism of printing due to the fact that it uses paper, but a fact often overlooked is that print is the only medium with a one-time carbon footprint, as all other media require energy every time they are viewed. A printout will last for years, as will a book, manual and print presentation.
This alone gives the assurance that printing is here for the long haul, and the volumes will continue to grow, as noted in my previous Industry Insight.
There are many trends emerging in printing, which will impact everyone over the next decade and beyond, so let's look at some of these.
Digital print will become the norm, overtaking lithography. It already holds almost half of the market, and will overtake lithography next year. This is from a market share of 8% in 1998, rising to 45% last year.
It's not hard to see why: more than half of print professionals say their top investment priority over the next three years is a digital infrastructure. Migrating to digital printing lowers a print shop's costs by 30%; 80% of print professionals say digital print has enhanced their profit; 60% of printers say digital services improve customer acquisition and retention; and it increases speed by 50%, allowing more jobs to run each day.
This in itself will enhance market receptiveness towards transpromo, the business of sending many customers their own, individual communication, based on accurate databases and variable data printing. It is a highly effective medium for enhancing responses and will reach the level of a successful science in years to come, straddling multiple media, including print.
As an example, a public health campaign was run in Britain using Xerox technology. The campaign exceeded target sign-ups by over 200%, producing personalised health plans for families across Britain, a task that required 4 million variants.
This leads me to virtual printing, which will grow in popularity in support of print: the combination of the two is unbeatable. Combined with SMS and social media, the marketing mix will deliver terrific results.
Splash of colour
Colour will become ubiquitous, as the cost, especially from solid ink, drops to a level comparable with black. Customer acceptance of communication and retention grows with colour, so it is no wonder colour output in the US will double from 100 billion pages in 2010 to 200 billion next year; and digital colour output will grow from 203 billion pages in 2009 to 459 billion next year. Digital and inkjet printing are making colour printing increasingly affordable, and by 2021, global production of colour will be 1.2 trillion pages.
Colour output in the US will double from 100 billion pages in 2010 to 200 billion next year.
Colour will also become increasingly sharp, up even from the extremely high quality of today's output. From a print shop perspective, it will easily exceed lithographic quality.
There will be increasingly green printers as technology advances. They will use even less electricity than today, in line with EnergyStar initiatives, with fewer moving parts and solid ink as the global state of the art. Solid ink removes millions of tons of waste from landfill as it produces 90% less waste than cartridge-based systems, with the highest quality in the industry.
QR codes are a relative innovation, but they are a major marketing phenomenon, linking printed materials to the digital realm. They will increasingly link the physical to the virtual, and 22% of the Fortune 500 have used them on print marketing. Their growth is staggering, with a reported growth in usage of more than 4 500% between 2010 and 2011.
3D printing is a new technique that is coming to the fore, and it will involve much more than paper. It involves the layering of output until a physical object emerges, and as if something from a Hollywood movie, it is being used to replace a human being's ear.
So, it is quite clear the technology of printing has become a science, with a little science fiction thrown in.
One other aspect is the notion that there are not enough trees to support all the printing. However, responsible forestry initiatives mean there will always be enough trees, and then some, to cater for the growing volumes of print, along with recycling initiatives, which have reached 60% in the US.
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