Eight More Votes for Print (or against email)

design trends

During a recent focus group that art270 coordinated to gather information about branding and recognition for a local, just-accredited University, the discussion moved to how the attendees receive and respond to various means of communication. There were eight focus group participants, all of them teachers or in the education field. During our talk it started to become clear that these education professionals (and I'm assuming many of their colleagues as well) prefer to get information about programs and events (in this case continuing education class offerings and seminars) as physical pieces of traditional mail in their workplace mailboxes — printed flyers, brochures, catalogs, postcards and letters. Each person in the room agreed that they were overwhelmed by electronic communications (especially email) and tended to ignore or delete most of what flowed into their inboxes without ever opening it. If they didn't recognize the sender then it was very likely they would never look at the message. With printed communications they said they were very likely to at least scan the content then choose to save it for later reading or discard it. The key point here is that they had to, at the very least, look at the brochure or flyer before they could make a decision whether it was of interest.

For the past year I've been writing about the value of balancing your communications efforts between electronic and print media. Because of cheaper costs and the ease of execution we've been too quick to abandon proven methods of reaching our audiences through print, yet we wonder why our business growth has slowed to a snail's pace. I know many of you are reading headlines that say "print is dead," but for these eight, well-educated people that ranged in age from their mid-twenties to early sixties, print is very much an important part of their lives.