There has never been a greater awareness of wide-format capabilities than we’re seeing today, largely driven by changes in how we utilize the environment around us to communicate graphically.
This growth and evolution in wide-format presents an opportunity for dealers to:
- Diversify their product offerings and expand into new markets to generate increased revenue and profit.
- Help offset business erosion due to changing market dynamics.
- Gain a competitive advantage for those already in the production print game.
Moving into the wide-format realm also gives dealers a natural expansion area into inkjet and serves as an entry point to expand beyond wide-format, which represents just one category of inkjet. Getting in now (and getting good at it) better prepares and positions dealers for future success as inkjet innovations advance and new inkjet technology is introduced.
Put simply, expansion and product diversification mean everything for dealers that want to grow their businesses, and extending into wide format can help quite a bit.
Background
A highly profitable adjacency to production printing, wide-format printers provide increased customization, flexibility, color gamut and ease of use to produce a variety of on-demand graphics applications across an array of printing substrates. Applications produced on wide-format printers include banners, signs, window graphics, trade show visuals, wallpaper, murals, backlit film, decals, vehicle wraps, construction and architectural plans, presentation backdrops and other large-format artwork or signage.
The breadth of industries and applications wide-format solutions serve can allow dealers to satisfy customer needs for print solutions that offer everything from high-resolution fine art to pharmaceutical labels. This creates ongoing opportunities for dealers and their customers to drive new revenue streams and enter new markets.
Market Trends
Businesses are leveraging wide-format printing and finishing to fulfill new and different demands, as we adjust to new ways of communicating and collaborating with one another globally. Examples include:
- Stores needing signage with instructions for self-checkout and graphics for reconfigured environments designed to lessen crowd density.
- Airports needing signage showing passengers how to safely queue and move baggage.
- Educational campuses needing increased signage due to staggered student schedules and for reducing congregation.
This growth in demand for signage, and the prospect for more, offers a big opportunity for dealers. For those that already have wide-format technology as part of their offerings, it means the potential for expanding their customer base and moving into new markets. And for those not yet offering this technology or its services, now is a good time to make the leap.
Trends impacting wide-format include:
- Shopping habits: Consumers have changed in recent years, and today, a majority of shoppers prefer touchless and more robust self-checkout options, which all require direction provided by signage.1 There’s a significant, long-term need for low-contact sharing of new and crucial information. In addition, demand for printed output shifted over the last year, with companies adapting to a more dedicated marketing spend on print, specifically. That’s something that will likely continue to be a focus and possibly even increase.
- Signage: Today we see broad use of floor and wall graphics as a new communication platform, including surfaces that hadn’t been used or even noticed for use before. For example, lawn signs were once the domain of political campaigns and real estate notifications. Now, there is a proliferation of people who, because they couldn’t (and in many cases still can’t) celebrate or communicate face to face, are using their lawns and windows to share information about graduations, birthdays and more. This mode of communication is likely here to stay.
- Substrates: Over the last few years, there’s been a huge shift in the number of people looking for alternative printing substrates to create new revenue streams, and this has revolutionized the retail signage industry. It’s possible to print on more materials than ever. Consider fabric—many users punted to fabric over other heavier materials to save on shipping and distribution costs. Another example is the use of wide format for décor and fine art.
These are just a few examples of customers being the greatest drivers of innovation simply by asking the question: can it be done? Ongoing development driven by market trends further drives improvements in ink and other application areas on a variety of different substrates.
Technological Advancements
Wide-format printing is uniquely positioned to meet evolving market needs for a number of reasons: it’s application driven, indoor/outdoor and largely substrate independent. This diversity is driving innovation and fueling market growth.
Ongoing enhancements to wide-format technology’s color gamut also allows the delivery of a more vibrant output with less downtime, making graphics more impactful, more quickly. Many devices also feature intelligent design to meet the demands of modern productivity, providing optimum quality for a wider range of applications. In addition, wide-format technology enhancements enable customers to take on more jobs and complete them faster on most substrates (stone, chalkboards, cloth, wood, etc.), combining unparalleled productivity with true media versatility.
Meanwhile, technological advancements in ink chemistry—in functionality and broader color gamut, such as the addition of orange and green—are changing the wide-format domain from four-color poster-printing inkjet machines into devices capable of far more diverse types of product manufacturing, enabling dealers to expand into new markets and help their customers meet brand requirements.
All these technological enhancements provide an opportunity for dealers to offer greater output capability and to explore customers they may never have called on before without a huge financial stretch to the end user.
Trending Applications and Submarkets
Traditionally, wide-format printing comprised only the sign and graphics market. However, the latest wide-format solutions empower users to deliver more applications to their customers, expand services and capture new profit potential in markets that previously would have been difficult to enter. Trending applications in wide-format print include retail and environmental signs and barriers, which also offer the opportunity for unique branding; queuing graphics, such as the large stickers many venues use to direct pedestrian traffic; and even car wraps, a unique and increasingly popular way to communicate graphically.
In addition, submarkets in the print industry, such as quick printers and general commercial printers, are recently realizing the benefits of wide-format. This represents a growing opportunity for dealer expansion and diversification. By introducing adjacent solutions such as wide-format to their current imaging portfolio, dealers can leverage their existing infrastructure to cross-sell and upsell, while at the same time access new markets, customers and lines of business.
Service Offerings
In their ongoing effort to provide more value to customers, dealers can tap into wide-format services, as well. By offering and supporting services such as basic installation training or design training, or more advanced services such as workflow software and/or QR codes to create more interactive offerings, dealers can deliver more impact for their customers and more routes to revenue for their dealerships.
There are a number of dealer services that can increase their competitive advantage and strengthen their value proposition to customers without burdening their business with the cost of additional headcount or unnecessary downtime. For instance, Ricoh makes specific productized service offerings available to our reseller partners. If they want to learn about color matching or teach an end-user how to produce ADA services to do braille, for example, they can take advantage of those services without being staffed to deliver that type of complex training. It helps them increase their competitive offerings without increasing their cost.
Direct access to industry-leading subject matter expertise is another way dealers can get a leg up on the competition. Ricoh has a team of industry experts with enormous cumulative experience in wide-format who partner with and support dealers at the headquarters and field level. This team leverages its technical, market, business and economic perspective on wide-format solutions to help dealers understand opportunities in this area and explore how they can best leverage them for future success.
Diversification and Education
Investing in wide-format and direct-to-substrate printing represents an opportunity for dealers to expand business with existing customers, diversify product portfolio and attract new customers. The best way for dealers to plug into the wide-format printer/services market is to work with a trusted partner, preferably with a long history in wide-format and inkjet technologies that can holistically evaluate existing printing operations and make suggestions that provide ease of execution.
Dealers should strive to secure an alliance that provides access to basic and advanced service capabilities that can allow customers to meet and exceed their business goals. In addition, look for a partner that offers specialized training at all levels for both front and back office while providing opportunities to use a full array of wide format-specific resources and training.
Continued education is key. At Ricoh, our dealer support teams take advantage of training opportunities to ensure dealers have strong knowledge of opportunities that exist in wide-format and share knowledge to help drive their success.
Ultimately, dealers that diversify their portfolios with wide-format solutions and services can offer more value to current customers, as well as secure new customers in new markets, all while increasing revenues.
Sources:
- 2019 Wide Format Application Survey; Keypoint Intelligence
