They call him the “celebrity CMO”. As the former chief marketing officer of Kodak, Jeffrey Hayzlett is a giant of the business world. Before he held the key role at Kodak – during its glory days in graphic arts – Hayzlett also worked for a number of print companies. He is now a consultant and bestselling author, and renowned as an expert in different marketing channels. Now often referenced for his expertise in social media (he has more than 50,000 Twitter followers), Hayzlett remains true to his first love – print. In a ProPrint exclusive, he speaks to former head of PMP Digital Graham Plant, who is now director of Pearl Business Solutions, specialists in maximising marketing effectiveness.

Graham Plant You’ve worked in the printing space and have a background in print. It’s fair to say that the past few years have been tough for the printing industry, particularly here in Australia. We have been seeing half-year results posted by printers that are well below forecast and volumes are way down across all print media. With the growth in digital channels continuing to escalate, do you think we are witnessing the demise of print as a viable marketing and communication medium?

Jeffrey Hayzlett No, not at all. In fact I think print is as strong as ever. The issue is the overcapacity of print right now, which is the problem in the market. There is just so much capacity, which has been driving the results. There are some businesses out there that, quite frankly and with all due respect to those businesses, some of them shouldn’t be running, as they are causing the capacity issues.

Print is still very effective. When I can show a direct mail campaign that gives me a $13 return for every $1 that I invest, that’s pretty doggone good. I’ll take that any single day as a marketer. And print is one of the very few respected and trusted mediums, particularly mail.

I mean, I’m worried about clicking on a link in an email because of what it might do to my computer. I’m usually not too worried about opening an envelope that’s addressed to me. There’s nothing in there that’s going to harm me. Most of the time it is has my name on it, it has a connection to me, it’s customised and versioned, it’s highly targeted to me, therefore, it’s going to be much more effective. So I don’t think print is going away.

Look at the last Harry Potter book. People stood in line. Kids stood in line, the people that we say will never read a book, never read a paper book, stood in line and slept out overnight to get the book. So if you do it right, they will come.

GP So the content is more important than the medium?

JH It all comes back to content. If you have great content, no matter how you feed it out, people are going to want it. They will want to get it and get it in the ways that they like. That’s not to say digital books aren’t important, because 60% of everything Amazon is selling is digital, particularly when it comes to new books. But there are still old books; I still like to read a ‘real’ book. I don’t necessarily like it on my iPad or my Kindle. Those are nice devices and I have them, but I prefer to hold the book. I prefer to read from the book and I can do that on the beach, I can do that in the sunlight and I don’t have to plug it in and worry about whether it’s got enough batteries.

GP Advertising legend David Ogilvy once said: “What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.” With the hype surrounding social media and the immediacy of digital communication, do you think this is still the case, or is the channel becoming more the focus of marketers rather than the message?

JH I think [social media] is like the “soup of the day”, in that marketers are focused on it, and they think it is the destination. It’s not the destination. Social media is a channel or a tool, just like a fax machine. Social media is just a delivery mechanism to the people. It’s not the destination.

Your real destination should be listening to customers, customer satisfaction, taking care of the customer, delivering a valued product at a valued time with a great value proposition. They’re what you should be focused on; not whether or not you have a Facebook page. Again, a Facebook page is not a destination: it’s just a channel.

I see all these social media experts – they’re basically fax consultants. They get mad it me for saying that, but that’s what they are. They’re no different to any other medium consultant. No different to a TV advertising consultant or a call centre consultant or a direct mail consultant.
All those can be valuable, but they’re not the end of the solution.

GP Interesting you reference social media experts. I read recently the title ‘social media expert’ has been the fastest growing job title in the last two years.

JH It’s like I said: “soup of the day”. You get all these guys saying they’re social media experts and I say “OK, I get you”, you use the fax machine, you use the telephone too, so you can be expert in those as well.

GP There is a perception that digital media has certain significant advantages over print, namely measurability. If I visit a website, you can measure the clicks, you can see what I’ve been doing, where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Do you agree with the view that measuring what happens in print is difficult?

JH That’s a misconception. I can measure it. I could measure it 30 years ago and I can measure it even more so today. I can put different offers in. I can use different telephone numbers. I can put different coupons; there are lots of different ways to measure that. Back in the late 1980s, I used to do mailings with business reply postcards. I would have different mailing lists. So I would take a stack of those postcards and I would take a magic marker and draw down the side of the cards. I would use the blue marker and those cards would go to group A, the red ones would go to group B, a purple marker for group C and so on. As those cards came back in, I would stack them up and I could tell which colours came back based on which message. This is a very crude way, but there are many techniques you can apply to refine this process to be a lot more effective. But the key is whether or not
you need to spend all your time on the ROI.

As a marketer, if I’ve got a pretty good feeling something is going to work, I don’t need to spend a lot of time on ROI. My experience tells me it’s going to work. I try not to get caught up in all the discussion right now on ROI because it can cost you more to measure it than it costs to do it.

GP You mean you don’t want to waste all your effort and time on measuring ROI if there’s no benefit?

JH [Marketing] should pay off. Yes, there is branding and increasing your visibility, but – and I can’t be more clear about this – you have to drive sales.

I used to have a chief financial officer when I was at Kodak. At the time, we were growing at double-digit growth in digital, and triple- and even quadruple-digit growth in a lot of product lines. I tried to convince the team we needed to invest more into advertising than into our marketing costs because our below the line costs were heavier than our above the line costs: we were spending more in programming, more in people, more in infrastructure and process than we were spending in advertising. So I was really trying to take money out of that and move it into straight advertising. I would go to the CFO after every campaign and when we had advertised something, and walk in and show him how sales went up. Then I would stop advertising and show him how sales went down. I kept doing this and bringing these results to his attention until he finally realised and said: “Jeff has convinced me that when we advertise sales go up and when we don’t sales go down.”

There’s an old saying: in good times advertise and in bad times advertise more. That’s what people should be doing. They should be sending out more mailings, they should be utilising print more, they should be getting their message out in the most efficient manner and more frequently.

GP Even though you’re a marketer from the “old school” with a background in print and traditional offline media, you have been very successful in social media with a huge number of fans and followers. Many businesses I work with still struggle to understand how to integrate social media or its potential benefits. How has social media helped you and your business?

JH I saw it as a natural extension of what I did. Any tool that is effective in my tool bag, I’m going to use. I saw it as a great way to connect with customers. I’ve always believed if you connect with customers, you will win.

Say you work in a software company, you’re going to make mistakes. After all, it is software; it inherently has bugs. So why not just be open and honest that you have problems? I’ve learned that you need to be really clear and really direct with the customer, because they expect that. Maybe this comes from running my own business. I could talk directly to customer and say: “Look I know we screwed up on this job, but I’ll make it up for you.” And he wouldn’t go away, because I was able to talk them directly.

I remember back in my print days, having to front up to the customer when we had printed the wrong colour, or printed their name wrong. We’ve all made those kinds of mistakes. From these experiences I’ve learned the benefits of strong relationships and how important good communication is with the customer.

So from the social media perspective, I saw this as a way of customers amplifying how they felt. I considered it a great use of OPM, or ‘Other People’s Money’, with the aim of utilising this feedback in order use it effectively and then it became a natural extension of who we are.

I got started with Twitter more so for my family. I’d be asked “Dad where are you at today?” and I would be able to keep them updated. Today I’m in Atlanta, tomorrow I’m in China and the next day I might be in Paris or whatever. They couldn’t keep up with me so I said follow me on Twitter and that’s how we got started. Then that grew from my family to my work family, then from my work family to all these other fans who started following me.

GP As someone who has worked closely with printers for many years, what would your advice be to the printing industry?

JH Get over it and move on. I mean, you don’t jump in a car, grab hold of the steering wheel and lock it in. You steer. If there are detours in the road you manoeuvre around them, you turn left, you turn right, you stop, you speed up, you slow down.

Printers, God bless them, are very process driven, which is important because they’re in the manufacturing business. They manufacture more one-off products than any other business in the world. They manufacture print the same way that car makers produce cars, but they do it one product at a time, and more of them.

Printers are the most efficient manufacturers in the world, bar none. I’ve always said if you want to know how to make money, give it to a printer. They’re making money on fractions of a penny.

But, at the same time, you can’t look back and just say I’m going to set up the process and then it will run itself. Always be looking for continuous improvement in the process and that goes for sales, the way in which we operate and the way in which we create our business models, because they will need to change over time.

Your process is about innovation. It’s about changing the process and continuing to improve the process, not locking it in and leaving it once it’s there. And that’s the mindset that is the difference.

Now, there are a lot of printers making a lot of money and doing a great job. I believe in the rule of thirds. A third of the people get it right straight away. A third eventually get it, and a third never will. You just never want to be in the bottom third.

Jeffrey Hayzlett on… SnapTags

Jeffrey Hayzlett is the bestselling author of management book The Mirror Test, and has recently published follow-up, Running the Gauntlet. The book stands out from the run-of-the-mill business guide thanks to the use of ‘SnapTags’. These images are a bit like QR codes, and can be scanned by a smartphone to link readers to online material such as videos of Hayzlett explaining key concepts. Here, the author explains what motivated him to use the new technology.

“I love print and I’ve been one of the biggest ambassadors for print since Guttenberg. As a marketer, I’ve just loved print, not to mention that I used to be a printer. But beyond that I also like to try new things and make things very interactive.

“I wanted the book to generate a lot of buzz. I wanted the book to be filled with great content, which I think it is, but I also wanted to do something different; as a marketer I have been known for being cutting edge. I started by putting QR codes at the beginning of every chapter and decided I wanted to mix things around.

“So we decided to put QR codes at the front of every chapter in the book that would give the reader something that they could go to. They would download the app and send something through to us.

“The problem with QR codes is that they look like they have been digitally vomited onto the page. People don’t know where they go to, they have to download an application so it’s not been widely accepted. When I looked or alternatives I found this new technology called SnapTags which allows you to snap a picture and text it, or you can download the application. We found that this was a much more amenable solution plus you could make it look like anything you wanted.

“We chose an icon of a man as used on the front of the book and this became the Snap Tag. It has been hugely successful, not to mention that I also get gather everybody’s names, I get to gather information on the readers, I get to see how many times you go back to the chapter and which chapters are your most favourite.

“Ultimately we wanted to do something different and interactive, so we made print interactive and SnapTags enabled us to do that.”

Jeffrey Hayzlett is running a program for printing industry leaders to workshop ideas and drive business breakthroughs. There will be a Hayzlett Print MasterMind Summit in Australia in August 2012.

For details, email gp@pearlbusinesssolutions.com.au

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