While some industry firms fear change, Innovative Print & Media Group Inc. thrives on it. Since its founding in a spare bedroom in 1985, the Collegeville, Pa., company has grown from a 1-person forms distributorship with sales of $385,000 to an integrated marketing communications firm with a 90,000-square-foot facility, 70 full-time employees and sales of $21.9 million in 2002.
"We were one of the earlier distributorships to make the transition from forms to commercial printing," says Bob Fisher, the distributorship's founder and president, about the firm's introduction of commercial printing in the late 1980s. "I remember going to DMIA's TradeMarts and its Annual Show, and you could never find a commercial printer."
Gradually, Innovative Print & Media Group began offering additional products and services in response to clients' growing needs. Today, the distributorship offers business forms, promotional products, warehousing and distribution, commercial printing, online inventory management, graphic design, corporate identity, copywriting, packaging, point-of-purchase signage, direct mail, mailing list procurement, trade show displays and advertising, fulfillment, media placement assistance, email marketing, CD-ROM development, database management and web site design. The company targets financial, pharmaceutical and retail businesses, as well as others that can benefit from its ability to offer total marketing solutions.
Standing Out from the Crowd
"Companies can go anywhere to get a product produced for them," says Rob Whitman, Innovative Print & Media Group's vice president of sales. "What separates us is the fact that we can solve a variety of marketing problems and execute a client's entire marketing strategy."
Approximately five years ago, Innovative Print & Media Group began offering fulfillment services. "One of our customers was having problems with their fulfillment house," Fisher says. "Our salesperson said, 'Let us take a whack at it.'" To complete the job--fulfilling coupon books for a marketing firm--the distributorship enlisted the help of its delivery drivers and other employees. "Suddenly, we were in the fulfillment business," Fisher says.
Today, Innovative Print & Media Group employs one full-time and approximately 50 part-time fulfillment workers, including retirees, college students and employees' family members. Because fulfillment jobs are handled in house, "We can respond on a dime to any unique request that a client may have," Whitman says. The distributorship provides custom, on-demand fulfillment of products such as kits for a software company that distributes electronic equipment and training kits for a pharmaceutical company's sales reps. Innovative Print & Media Group also provides an advertising agency with custom kits for NFL Properties Inc., the licensing arm of the National Football League. The distributorship hand-assembles the kits, which could contain shirts, trading cards, items autographed by NFL players and more depending on recipients' needs, and distributes them to retailers and other businesses nationwide. "A lot of the work we do is hand work," says Chuck Clifford, the distributorship's vice president of operations. Because some of the NFL items have high dollar-values, the distributorship also warehouses those items in a secure environment.
In 2000, Innovative Print & Media Group partnered with a third-party firm and began offering technology-based services such as web site design, email marketing and web site banner ads. (The distributorship purchased the third-party firm in 2001.) Innovative Print & Media Group can design web sites featuring Flash animation, Rich Media and streaming video with audio. It also provides web optimization services (ensuring clients high rankings in search engines), and content management services, editing and upgrading clients' sites as needed.
Innovative Print & Media Group's email marketing offering helps clients drive traffic to their web sites and sell products and services. The distributorship developed a custom tracking mechanism that allows clients to assess the effectiveness of campaigns. For example, the mechanism records when recipients open messages, how long they view them and which links they click on. "This tracking feature allows us to understand recipients' click-through behavior, so follow-up marketing--whether it's direct mail or e-marketing--can be done in a much more targeted fashion," Whitman says. Innovative Print & Media Group distributes email messages in HTML or text-only format based upon recipients viewing capabilities. For example, AOL email users can't view messages in HTML format.
Innovative Print & Media Group also offers online learning tools such as Flash-animated tutorials, tests and surveys. For example, the distributorship recently created a Flash-animated tutorial for a pharmaceutical company. The client's sales representatives log on to the pharmaceutical company's intranet to view the tutorial, which explains the uses of a particular drug, its benefits, its side effects and more. The tutorial also includes a quiz to test what the sales representatives learned. The pharmaceutical company has asked Innovative Print & Media Group to provide online tutorials for eight additional products.
Focusing on Clients
Although Innovative Print & Media Group has changed dramatically during its 18 years in business, the company's focus on customer service has endured. "That's one of the reasons I came to Innovative," says Whitman, a 20-year industry veteran who has served the distributorship for one year. "One of the key differentiators in this business is your ability to deliver on high-value customer service."
Innovative Print & Media Group provides a large electronics retailer with store signage. Approximately eight months ago, the client called the distributorship at 3 p.m. on a Friday with an urgent request. "They were having a sale," Whitman says. "They originally told us they wanted store signage to promote this sale on Saturday. We had everything packaged and ready to ship to get there Saturday morning, but now they said they wanted everything Friday night." Innovative Print & Media Group's employees jumped into action, delivering signage to approximately 50 store locations in the Philadelphia area, including some locations approximately 11ˇ2 hours away. "Employees who had no ties to this client just grabbed product and took it to malls and store locations on their way home," Whitman says. "I heard about it on Monday, and it just blew me away....That kind of stuff happens on a regular basis here."
Serving Up Total Solutions
Approximately one year ago, The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia approached Innovative Print & Media Group after making the decision to transition from a 2-year accredited culinary and pastry arts school to a 4-year accredited school. The school also decided to begin offering bachelor's and associate's degree programs in restaurant and hotel management. The client wanted a redesigned web site that would reflect its new offerings.
"They asked us to bid on the web site project, but it was the entire scope of services we could provide to support the web site that won us the bid," Whitman says. Innovative Print & Media Group developed an integrated marketing strategy to promote the school and its new programs of study, and drive traffic to its site. The strategy included a redesigned site, a direct mail campaign and online advertising.
Innovative Print & Media Group created a 125-page site for The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College. The homepage includes pull-down menus visitors can access for additional information about the school's programs, campus, student life, admissions guidelines and more, as well as an online application feature that allows prospective students to submit applications online.
Using a digital camera and software from Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based imaging software and services provider Internet Pictures Corp. (better known as iPIX®), the distributorship also created 360-degree panoramic virtual tours of one of the school's state-of-the-art kitchens and its European Courtyard, which is surrounded by several of the school's open-to-the-public restaurants. When visitors to the school's homepage select "Virtual Tour" from the "Campus" pull-down menu, they're taken to a page with images of the two available tours. After clicking on an image, a visitor drags his or her computer mouse across the image to pan around the room/area, zoom in and out, and examine any part of the room/area at his or her own pace. The feature is JavaScript™-enabled so visitors don't have to download software plug-ins.
The direct mail campaign included a series of six 4 x 6-inch post cards that aimed to capture the elegance of The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College and entice prospective students to attend a variety of upcoming open-house events. Designed by Innovative Print & Media Group's graphic design department, the post cards featured vibrant 4-color photos and invitations to events such as the school's "Winter in the Caribbean," "A Taste of Ireland" and "Sizzlin' Summer Barbecue" open houses. The distributorship predicted recipients would post the cards on their refrigerators or bulletin boards, so important details such as dates and locations were printed on the fronts of the cards. The post cards were mailed to approximately 10,000 people who previously had shown interest in the school.
Innovative Print & Media Group also designed a banner ad to drive traffic to the school's web site. The distributorship provided media placement assistance by helping the client select a travel and hospitality site on which to post the ad.
Within six months of the first post card mailing, prospective-student visits to The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College campus increased by more than 41 percent. In addition, the mailing saved the client $45,000 in marketing costs. Previously, the school ran TV advertisements in conjunction with its direct mail campaigns to increase response rates, but the school decided TV advertisements weren't necessary this time because the mailing achieved such impressive results. The direct mail campaign won a 2003 Benjamin Franklin Award for Direct Marketing Excellence from the Philadelphia Direct Marketing Association.
Following the integrated marketing campaign, traffic to The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College's web site jumped dramatically and enrollment increased. The school estimates the campaign has increased the number of hits to its web site by more than 60 percent and that the online application feature has increased inquiries to the school by approximately 60 percent. Additionally, the number of applicants who claim the internet as their lead source of information about the school has increased from 8 percent to 21 percent. The school recently purchased a new building to help facilitate enrollment growth.
"Companies can go anywhere to get a product produced for them," Whitman says. "What separates us is the fact that we can solve a variety of marketing problems and execute the client's entire marketing strategy."
Kara S. Carpenter is assistant managing editor of Print
Solutions. Email her your comments at kcarpenter@PSDA.org.
