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Personalisation offers great future potential for printing, but looking past the extravagant promises, what challenges does it present for printers?

Ever since Coca-Cola’s successful ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, which saw more than 1,000 different names printed on bottles of the popular beverage, personalisation has been a major buzzword within the print industry. It’s not hard to see why, given the impressive statistics associated with it. The value of the personalised gift market – from fashion to beauty products to entertainment and travel – is expected to reach $31 billion by 2021, according to HP – up 55% from 2016. The global custom t-shirt print industry is expected to surpass $10 billion by 2025, according to research firm Credence. Meanwhile, HP says that 70% of shoppers are willing to spend at least 10% more on personalised products.

It’s no surprise, then, that FESPA’s 2018 Print Census revealed that diversification into new markets and product offerings is a key focus of investment for 53% of printers – more than 50% of those surveyed said that customers were increasingly putting short-run printing, just-in-time manufacturing and personalisation at the top of their shopping lists. And this service is no longer the sole domain of big hitters like Coke. HP’s D4D software plug-in lets designers create a template that merges multiple fields of image data to create unique creative combinations of a single design. Alternative companies such as Ghost GmbH have developed toner based transfer technologies that facilitate small runs on small format lasers at a reasonable price.

Is the quest worth it?

But is personalisation truly the Holy Grail for printers? It certainly could be, but it brings with it a number of challenges that mustn’t be overlooked amid all the excitable hype. “One of the biggest issues is that printers jump into personalisation because it’s the new, sexy thing, and they don’t consider how it’s a completely different business to what they’re used to,” says Zsolt Rácz, Senior Vice-President of International Business Development at Printbox in Poland.

I see a lot of printers putting resources into personalisation services, but aren’t always giving enough consideration to the customer journey

This is especially the case when it comes to marketing, he says, noting that printers that have traditionally operated in a B2B sphere often struggle when it comes to attracting the consumer audience that’s after personalisation. “It’s a totally different market, and…

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