Shades of Success — Sherburne

ONE OF the things many printers pride themselves on is their knowledge and understanding of color. After all, we spend a lot of time and effort on managing and matching color to meet critical customer expectations. That color expertise can be a great marketing tool as you work to build better and deeper relationships with existing clients and to acquire new ones.

Of course, your ability to produce the colors a customer is expecting—accurately and consistently—is the primary way we think about applying our color expertise. But as we transition into this new world we find ourselves in, with competition from all sorts of traditional and nontraditional sources, there are some very interesting and creative ways to leverage your color knowledge to bring additional value to customers. It is those added-value services you offer that can take your business out of the commodity zone and narrow the competitive playing field for you.

In future columns, I will share other ideas for narrowing the competitive playing field and differentiating yourself in the market. This month, the focus is on color.

To get more information about how print service providers could expand their color value add, I turned to one of the most recognized names in color, Pantone Inc., and its vice president of marketing, Doris Brown.

Brown started by pointing out that she had been seeing quite a few mainstream articles about how companies use color to differentiate themselves. One in particular appeared in LinuxWorld and talked about color themes and color-based marketing strategies in the computing industry, ranging from IBM’s Big Blue to Red Hat’s red fedora and Extreme Networks’ signature purple. To view the entire article, visit www.linuxworld.com and search for “colorful story.”

Colors that Separate

Articles such as this one demonstrate that our customers may be thinking about color in a different way, especially as they try to “break out of the clutter,” as they say. Understanding the other dimensions of color can be helpful in extending the range of color expertise you can offer your customers.