Thursday 2 December 2010

That in-drawn breath

My interpretive friend Norm was talking about customer reactions the other day. "It's the indrawn breath I find interesting - noisily, over the teeth", he said. He gave a brief demonstration sounding like a car mechanic. investigating a rattle in a 1962 BMW.

"Of course it's all psychology really", he continued. "It depends on what construction you want to place on it.

Print buyers seem to be trained from birth to do it automatically. I reckon they'd still do it if you tried quoting them a tenner for 3,000 letterheads, so it's obviously a reflex action. Despite that, most printers seem to take it as a cue for them to reduce their price and give money away from their back pocket.

"That's why I eventually evolved my own strategy for dealing with it. No matter how much mark-up you've built into it, I always respond to that indrawn breath by saying `Yes, that's pretty good, to-plate technology, see, isn't it?' It's wonderful - it completely wrongfoots them and, before they realise what's happening, they've agreed with you and you've got the order."

"Of course, now I've got Printpak, I know exactly how close to the bone to pare my prices without losing money, so it sort of gives me the whip hand these days. Now I can play these `so you're in printing for the benefit of your health' johnnies at their own game. Mind you, I've got a pretty good line in humbug-sucking impressions to use on my own suppliers."

It's a funny old game, printing, isn't it?

(If you want to make sure that you're not `anybody's mug', why not give try downloading Printpak? Don't believe anything you hear unless you've tried it for yourself.)