Mark Stephenson is Marketing Product Manager for Jet Press at Fujifilm. In this interview, Mark speaks to Karis Copp about challenges and opportunities in the commercial print market, why digital packaging growth remains subdued, and how the Jet Press outshines the competition even when it comes to traditional print.  

Can you talk a bit about your background and how you got into print? 

I left school with no qualifications apart from a handful of pretty poor O Levels, as they were called back then. My first job was as a letterpress printing apprentice. I was a compositor, which for those who are too young means I was assembling letterpress type, and I did that for seven years. 

Then I left print and did various things from running an old folks’ day centre to being a church youth leader, to running a Youth Training Scheme, and eventually, I ended up at a recruitment agency. I got back into print when a job came into the recruitment agency to sell Apple Macintosh computers. That was 1989 when you could sell an Apple Macintosh computer for upwards of £10,000. I found a market in graphic designers and printers, who were sceptically poking them with a long stick, saying, ‘I don’t think this will catch on, but we might buy one anyway’. 

I ended up at Fujifilm in 1999 – 21 years ago. I moved around in various roles, never sticking at one thing too long, always looking for nice shiny new things to do – I find repetition boring, and I would rather look at something new and different and exciting, that’s always what’s attracted me. That’s why I have held a variety of roles at Fujifilm. 

What projects were you working on when you first joined Fujifilm?

I initially joined Fujifilm to work on a project which was way ahead of its time, which was basically cloud computing. It was called the Valiano Management System, and it stored all of your assets and shared them among teams: prepress files, photography, illustration, fonts, everything– the only thing missing was a decent internet connection. I remember we showed a similar system at an IPEX once, and before we could carry out the demo we had to tell everyone on the stand, ‘log off the internet now!’ It was a grand idea that people justweren’’t ready for.

Then I moved into roles in sales support and sales management, and as soon as we got the chance to sell digital equipment, which started with Xerox presses, I got involved in that, before moving on to the Jet Press itself. Three years ago, we set up a European marketing team, and I joined that to be ‘the Jet Press guy’ for marketing, which I still am – Marketing Product Manager for Jet Press. 

Can you talk about the history of the Jet Press, and what makes the machine unique? 

We are on the 3rd generation of the Jet Press now, following its preview a number of drupas ago. We have been shipping the press for more than eight years now, so we feel that we are one of the leaders of innovation in the high-quality inkjet market, and we were first to market with a press that has sold more than any other B2 inkjet press. The reason it’s done that is because it’s the highest quality inkjet press you can buy. It’s a bold claim, but a true one.

Our latest campaign describes it as the new standard in print. We’re not saying the new standard in digital or new standard in inkjet, it’s the new standard in print, full stop. There is no other production printer that can print as high quality as the Jet Press, and that’s including offset, flexo, toner, or anything else. It sounds pompous but you just need to look at the quality – it’s not fake news! It’s a nice position to be in, to have a market-leading product like that. It’s easier than making excuses – I never have to make an excuse! 

There are other considerations of course; you don’t just buy a press because it’s good quality, but because it fits your commercial offering, your production requirements, and the kind of products that you want to create – but it’s a great starting point, saying, ‘OK, quality is not an issue, let’s move on to the next point’, which could be running costs, uptime, or productivity, something like that. We spent a long time in the past talking quality with Jet Press, but now everyone has seen it is consistent, and the print quality doesn’t vary, so we are able to move the conversation away from that and onto serious conversations that lead to investment decisions.

The cases where we find the Jet Press fits are with people who know how to sell high-value print. It’s not aimed at businesses printing throwaway print, and I mean no disrespect to these products as there is a place in the market for them, but it’s not aimed at the mail that drops through your door that may make it into the kitchen or may go straight in the bin, or you may hold on to for a day or two then throw in the bin. We are talking about high-quality products that people want to keep, that people enjoy interacting with. 

Very often, our customers are making printing products designed for end-users to buy, such as a photobook or personalised print of some kind, maybe a book, something like that – the next level on from promotional print. Having said that, some people are producing really nice promotional print on the Jet Press too – it’s not about looking for the lowest cost per thousand I could possibly get away with to sell baked beans. We’re not trying to address that market. We’ll never be the cheapest, as the cheapest will always involve a sacrifice of some kind. It’s not our key focus. 

Do traditionally offset businesses look into the Jet Press and purchase the machine? 

Yes. That’s exactly the point – businesses are more likely to invest in the Jet Press is if they have the experience of the quality, uptime and productivity of offset. This is because the Jet Press gives them just the same, except higher quality and more flexibility. If someone is looking for the ‘green button technology’ of a toner-based press, where you drop paper into a drawer, hit the green button and it spits it out the other end, where the registration might not be wonderful, the consistency of colour might wander around a little, but it's good enough for that market, the Jet Press is not in that zone, it’s not in the print on demand area. 

With the Jet Press, you have something you want to take more care over, not because it takes longer to print, but because you have a higher-end product. Makeready time on the Jet Press is one second, and every sheet can be different, so it’s more like a one second makeready offset press. Show that to an offset printer, and as long as the economics are right, because obviously inkjet ink costs more than litho ink, it’s a very convincing argument. The Jet Press works using an offset chassis, so it uses grippers to keep the paper in registration, offering 100% accurate registration all the time. That’s something that people from a digital background have possibly given up on because they have never had that. They find ways to work around it, with finishing equipment manufacturers using special cameras to line the sheets up because the image is never in the same place on the sheet for long when it comes off most digital presses. The Jet Press takes you back to the accuracy and quality of offset.  

You mentioned the current Jet Press is the third generation of the machine– what are some of the changes to the Jet Press, and what has driven those changes?

With the first Jet Press machine, the 720, the quality was great but some of the ways in which it was designed meant that the maintenance of the machine got to be quite expensive. We had a single piece printbar, made up of 17 heads but all fixed together – if you wanted to change one head you had to change the whole bar. Things like that are barriers to productivity. So when the second generation came out, the 720S, we added some features to make it more productive and we changed the concept of all the heads being bonded together in the bar, making them separate. We made the decision then to replace every 720 in the market with the 720S, then we sold around 150 machines. 

Just over a year ago we launched the 750S, and we didn’t change anything about the quality of the press, we just made it more productive. It’s just the same, but faster; now instead of running 2,700 sheets an hour it now runs at 3,600 sheets an hour. We have learned how to make the machine more productive, with less time cleaning, and easier maintenance, which means it’s printing more of the time. We added some improvements to paper handling so that we can print a wider range of stocks, from very light to very heavy weight. It’s improvements like this that are the difference between the two latest machines. 

What are your thoughts on the current state of the commercial print market? 

I think it varies across Europe. You can’t paint the commercial print market in Europe with a broad brush. In the UK, for example, we target the B2 offset printers because our machine fits well in that environment, but go to Germany, and you will struggle to find any B2 presses – it’s nearly all B1 and above, high productivity, high automation, Industry 4.0 environments. So when you talk about the commercial print market, it’s difficult to pin down what it really means, but what I will say is that the commercial printers that are surviving and thriving are going for the high-value market, where people that are buying appreciate good print and the print service providers can demand the kind of money that makes it worthwhile. 

Print Champion Matthew Parker is right when he says you can’t just ring someone up and say do you have any work today because that invites the conversation of how cheap you can do it. The industry needs the kind of salesperson that goes into a meeting with a customer and asks, what marketing challenges are you facing today that we can work on together? What ideas can we come up with that can help you get the most bang for your marketing buck? 

A successful salesperson doesn’t just wait for the phone to ring, or occasionally canvass customers for work – it’s a collaboration position rather than a sales job, and those are certainly the people who are making the Jet Press work. We are seeing a shift towards printing less of everything, and that means they need to make sure they are charging more for each sheet. That’s where the Jet Press comes in; it can do that short-run work cost-effectively, which isn’t the case with an offset press. 

Every printer is different, every country is different, every market is different. That’s why our sales teams take the standard features and benefits of the Jet Press and apply it to their market, and each one has different reasons for gaining a sale. 

Will packaging go for inkjet? 

The issue with digital print in the packaging market is that we have been quoting the same numbers now for ten or fifteen years. I have heard them from HP, Xerox etc at a number of digital print for packaging seminars and so on; everyone says what a great opportunity the packaging market is, only 3% of packaging is currently printed digitally. The problem is, that number hasn’t changed much in 15 years – for some reason digital print in the packaging market isn’t picking up in high volume. There are a lot of great stories and examples of campaigns, but they are no more than special projects, they are not part of the production flow for a packaging printer. What I have concluded from that, and I could be wrong, is that the route to market is not ready for variable, regionalised and short-run print in the packaging market. The supermarkets don’t want loads of different SKUs going to 20 different locations, because they don’t want to keep track of all that. It’s bad enough getting product to the store with a decent sell-by date, not discounting it or even worse wasting it, because no one bought it in time. When it comes to, ‘this one has to be in Manchester, this one in Sheffield, and this one in Cardiff’, they will say, no thanks. The number of SKUs in the supermarkets has grown by 4% each year for the past 40 years, that’s thousands of more product lines. Nobody wants multiple variations of the same product. The digital packaging initiatives that have worked have been random, like a bottle of Coke with your name on it, or the Kit Kat promotion, where you could pick up a pack in store and win the chance to upload a photo of you, or your dog, or whoever, and have it printed on the KitKat wrapper. However, that fulfilment was by mail, it never touched the supermarket. So the digital part of that whole campaign was just a few thousand bars that sent out that were personalised. Compared with the millions of KitKats made a day, it’s a really small percentage.

I think brands see it as a cute thing to do occasionally, and a fun project, but it still hasn’t gone into the mainstream, therefore the big packaging converters haven’t invested heavily in digital because they don’t see the demand for it. Nobody's really working that hard to create more and more digital solutions in the print market, but it's really tempting for people who make equipment because they look at the long-term prospects. And they say, you'll always need packaging because you’ll always need to put warnings and ingredients and whatever else on the package to tell the consumer whats inside. And while it’s a legal requirement then packaging will have to carry on.

This is why you have over 100 different kinds of digital label press on the market; they’ve gone there because they want part of that but packaging as a whole, especially folding carton, you have a few companies in every country mopping up these little jobs that the big boys can’t handle, and that’s how it works – we have four or five Jet Presses around Europe dedicated to packaging, and they are primarily mopping up work from larger operations who have an occasional need for short runs, or they’re addressing very specific markets like people making artisan biscuits or cheese, something made in small batches and the producer doesn’t know how many he wants until a few days before delivery. So I’m pretty cynical on packaging! I don’t see the signs yet of it suddenly exploding, but the potential is fantastic.  

What are your thoughts on print’s ability to sell itself? 

I think it’s getting better. The penny is starting to drop. There's been enough exposure now online and through seminars and whatever else for most people to realise that just asking for an order is not enough, but it's still not easy. It takes a new type of salesperson than it did previously. The industry as a whole is still full of a load of old blokes – and I’m one of them! It takes a long time to turn a big ship around, but I think we’re starting to get there. I guess there are two ways to sell print, one is to the market who know what they want – e.g. someone knows they want a 16-page leaflet, saddle-stitched A5, and they want 1,000. The problem with that kind of product is the salesperson has very little to add to that, and the person may as well go online and order it. The value is added when someone doesn’t know what they want, but they know they want something. For a professional print salesperson that can be seen as a frustrating conversation or a massive opportunity. 

However, those commercial printers I spoke about earlier that are thriving, they understand that and they know that's part of what you do, and so those kinds of printers will say, we're having an open house, come in and we'll train you on how print works, we'll talk to students, designers and people like that. It doesn't just mean, oh, we'll offer website design as well as print, which was the first thing that everyone thought was the answer. It's about relationships. Also the whole idea of social selling and using social media, primarily LinkedIn but probably also Twitter and Instagram and maybe Facebook,to nurture relationships with people, to identify people who need things – that’s a really important thing coming over the horizon. Companies in the tech world have already got that idea; we’re sort of in a crossroads with print, halfway between tech and a cottage industry. 

The idea of building a relationship online, earning the right to talk to somebody and having a relationship and conversation, there’s a lot of potential in that because people won't answer the phone anymore. People won't come downstairs to talk to the salesperson in reception anymore. Prospects may show an interest in something but when sales come to follow up, they don't talk to them. They’ve got other things to do, it was important at the time but now that moment has passed. Social selling is a way of building on that. It's something we at Fujifilm need to get into. I’ve been doing a bit of digging around in that area, and I think it has a great deal of potential. Watch this space!