Mark James is no printer. He doesn’t pretend to understand all the technical aspects of the trade. Yet few would be better qualified to discuss it. He buys print. He sells print. And he’s passionate about how it generate sales.

GJI’s managing director has no agenda to transform the industry or tell printers what to do. However, when prompted, he offers valuable insights that could help printers boost their businesses. His Brisbane company specialises in variable digital print and data management, so he has an intimate understanding of the communications chain.

Here’s his main advice for printers: “Stop asking to quote on work.” The moment you do that, the discussion turns to price. He says GJI never buys print solely based on price and he’s sick of printers telling GJI they can do work cheaper than somebody else. What printers should be doing is asking clients about their campaign objectives and how the two parties can work together to achieve them.

James offers another tip: don’t switch off once the job has been produced. He says a surprisingly large number of printers don’t bother asking for news about the campaign and whether it generated sales. Printers who follow through on their jobs will differentiate themselves, he adds.

Let the show begin

James has come a long way in 25 years. He left school in year 10, which he jokes was a condition of employment for the industry he eventually ended up joining – music promotion. He would ‘buy’ shows from artists and sell them first to venues and then the general public. Clients included Hunters & Collectors, Hoodoo Gurus, Jimmy Barnes, John Farnham and Diesel.

He noticed that pubs and clubs had a serious data problem. They gathered information about their customers through membership schemes, but it was generally being stored on cards and being poorly exploited, if at all. It dawned on him that these venues would be willing to pay someone to manage their data.

GJI opened its doors in 1999. James co-founded the business with his flatmate, Anthony Grant, and both still retain 50% shareholdings. Grant was the ‘G’ in GJI; James was the ‘J’. The name sounded funny without a third initial, so they added an ‘I’ and decided that it stood for ‘International’.

It could have stood for ‘Ironic’. “We started from quite humble beginnings – basically in our garage,” says James. But it turned out they’d stumbled upon a winning formula. Firstly, the two partners complemented each other perfectly – James had the sales skills and the creative flair, while Grant provided IT and systems expertise. Secondly, there was a much greater demand for data management than they had imagined.

First cab off the rank

GJI’s first product was called Membership Management: it took data from cards and turned it into electronic reports. James says the business then grew as clients kept asking for new products and GJI kept finding ways to provide them. That included fulfilment services; another innovation was turning the data into newsletters featuring personalised messaging. “We didn’t realise how valuable that was. It just made sense to us,” he says.

Their garage turned into a bustling workplace as printers spat out documents and Australia Post vans rolled up to collect the mail. It soon became apparent that a proper office was needed, so in 1997 GJI moved from its Carindale garage to Mansfield. GJI moved to a new Mansfield site in 1998, which it then expanded in 1999 and 2001. In 2003, GJI moved to its third different Mansfield premises, which it expanded two years later. These days, GJI is a 50-staff company that operates out of a stylish 4,000 sqm Murarrie site, which it has occupied since 2009.

“We didn’t anticipate growing to the size we are today,” says James. The firm grew at “crazy rates” during its first decade, he adds, partly due to the fact that GJI steered clear of the tier-one clients, which were handled by Salmat, SEMA and Computershare, and instead went for the next tier down. Growth was also partly due to a focus on strong customer service, he says. “Referrals have been our single greatest form of customer acquisition.”

Building relationships

There’s another lesson in there for printers. Retaining an old client costs less than winning a new one. If printers focus on providing clients with value, rather than the cheapest price, they’ll come back for more – and maybe provide referrals while they’re at it, he says.

Clients often ask GJI to generate data for them so they can land more customers and make more sales. However, many of these clients turn out to have more data than they need – they just aren’t using it properly. The key is to manipulate the data so that specific promotions are sent to specific customers, James says.

James is channel agnostic when it comes to communicating with customers. His aim is to generate the maximum return on investment, whether that’s through direct mail, print ads, emails, text messages or call centres. That said, he feels the strongest emotional connection to print.

“We’re not married to any one channel, but a personal passion of mine is direct mail and now more than ever because I think it’s the channel that gets the best cut-through. Because the letterbox has never been emptier. I think people appreciate a direct mail piece because the space isn’t as busy as it once was.”

DM pieces don’t need to be gimmicky or even particularly stylish to generate sales. But they do have to be smart, he says. “Smart print has a level of intelligence behind it that’s directly related to the customer. Content is only one element – it’s got to be relevant, timely and personal.”

Success stories

Years of crunching numbers has taught James what works and what doesn’t. “That’s the power of data. If you can understand data then you will be in a situation where you have the ability to influence behaviour.”

One example he offers is Mr Rental, a franchise group of rental stores operating across Australia and New Zealand. Mr Rental was concerned that its electronic marketing wasn’t generating enough repeat business, so GJI conducted an “in-depth behavioural analysis of Mr Rental’s customers”. It then created highly personalised and visual pieces of direct mail to be sent out at contract renewal time. The campaign generated a “crazy” 400% return, says James. “We identified the pattern in the data. The channel that didn’t work was electronic. The channel that did work was direct mail.”

GJI’s ongoing Flight Centre campaign is another successful marriage of data and print. The DM piece includes the name and photo of the recipient’s local consultant; three offers based on the departure city; and photos of these places. The campaign involves runs of 10,000-20,000 each time, says James.

It all adds up

GJI derives 10% of its revenue from print, which is handled by a fleet of Konica Minolta production devices. Another 40% comes from data management, while the remaining 50% comes from fulfilment and non-print communications such as emails and its call centre work. The company has added Bridgestone and Goodstart Early Learning this year to its client list, which also includes Telstra, Suncorp, Bank of Queensland, The Coffee Club, Lexus, Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology, he says.

One area that hasn’t been as successful as expected was last year’s acquisition of Colourwise. The small-format and large-format digital outfit seemed like a perfect fit because it was supplying GJI with work in letterheads, brochures and manuals. However, it hasn’t yet generated the returns that were expected, says James.

“We were outsourcing work to them and unfortunately they got into trouble. We saw it as an opportunity but haven’t had substantial gains from it yet, but it’s opening up doors into new markets.”

James sees opportunities for printers to create new work rather than quote on existing jobs. The first step is for printers to show how they can generate sales for their clients; the next step is to create a measurable campaign. In other words, it all comes back to his beloved data.

The advice James gives to his clients could equally apply to printers. “If you’re not digging deep in your database to understand customer behaviours, trends and hot spots, then you are missing out. The better you understand your customer, the better you can engage them – with positive impacts on retention, spending and profitability.”

Resumé

Age 42

Role Chief executive

Shareholding 50%

Education Iona College, Brisbane

Hobbies Cycling, poker

Family  Wife and two children, aged 6 & 9

Mark James on…

Loving print

It’s tangible. It’s tactile. It gets cut-through. The other channel is so noisy and so busy and there are so many filters that your message gets lost in an ocean of other messages. With print, in a busy world, people can take the time to appreciate it. I don’t view it as a cost, but a quality message that you should invest in.

Printers cashing in on data

Every customer a printer will talk to will have a data requirement and they need to look at ways of incorporating that into their communication. Clients are now measuring a lot more of what they do, so printers should be part of that dialogue, otherwise they’re purely a commodity player. Clients today aren’t interested in transactions; they are interested in customers, and there’s a big difference between transactions and customers.

The importance of data

Data can substantiate what you’re doing. Gut feel only gets you so far, but with hard data, you can see if you actually have a return and can make better decisions. It’s all about the customer now.

His time in the music industry

It was fun. But it’s a business – there are costs and returns. We got to do lots of different things. It was really challenging in some of the environments we had to work in – such as trying to put 20,000 people into a facility that holds 11,000.

Business partner Anthony Grant

Anthony has a great ability to take concepts and systemise them or ‘productionise’ them. He’s got fantastic financial acumen. He basically handles the finance and innovation side of our business, whereas I’m more the commercialisation and sales side.

GJI’s early years

They were very much about customer data – so nothing has really changed in that regard. We were working with hospitality venues that wanted to manage their loyalty base and we put together communication initiatives to support the marketing of their day-to-day operations.

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