POINT OF SALE
n the last couple of years we have seen a number of cutbacks as marketing budgets were slashed and companies ditched anything but essential print and media campaigns. But one area which has continued to thrive has been Point of Sale (POS) because every company was keen to ensure that if someone was buying a product it had to be theirs.
What’s the point I
By Tracey Rushton-Thorpe
affordable and easier to use so whether you are a commercial printer, or a small in-house unit, the technology is available to suit the demands and the budgets of every customer.
A piece of cake
POS is one of the oldest and some would argue most effective forms of marketing because you are targeting people when they have their wallets and purses in their hands ready to make a purchase.
Well we have all been there haven’t we, standing at the till, just about to pay, when your attention is caught by something which you weren’t intending to buy, but which somehow ends up in your hand. It’s as simple as that, and while we can all congratulate ourselves on not shelling out for the latest products which are advertised on TV or in magazines, it takes a strong will to resist POS material.
Big business
It is because of this that marketing teams have been utilising point of sale material to its full extent in the last few years as we suffered an economic downturn. But where once POS was fairly limited to high value products, it is now rolled out in just about every industry for a vast array of products. The main advantage for this market is that the printing technology which we have at our disposal means that we can do short run, personalised campaigns to suit every budget. So where perhaps large outlets and supermarkets would have at one time had a ‘one size fits all’ campaign, they can now personalise the campaign to suit every individual branch or shop. The technology has also become more
20 SCREEN PROCESS AND DIGITAL IMAGING l July/August 2011
Cornwall-based Warrens Bakery is a case in point with their recent addition of an Epson Stylus Pro 7700 inkjet printer which has been purchased to improve the impact they have on their customers and increase their speed to market by producing A1 and A2 promotional posters in-house.
Founded in 1860, Warrens Bakery has expanded steadily from its Penzance, Cornwall site and today has 60 shops in the South-West, as far afield as Barnstaple and Exeter. The vast
majority are branded as Warrens Bakery and sell a range of baked goods from traditional pasties and saffron cakes to hampers and Christmas puddings. Two stores carry the recently- launched Simply Cornish brand, which also supports an online shop, and an extended range of up market, locally produced fine foods. Warrens runs regular promotions throughout its stores, often timed to coincide with saint’s days or local village events, but producing posters and other point-of-sale materials to support these was difficult and expensive, and they were experiencing quality restrictions on externally-sourced digital print.
Graphic and web designer Martin Sanders who was tasked with finding a suitable large- format printer that would provide the productivity, flexibility and quality to bring poster production in-house says: “We had an older printer that had come to the end of its life, so we had stopped producing anything larger than A3. We were outsourcing A3 posters but it was costing too much to produce the A1 and A2 posters in the short runs and with the fast turnaround we needed. Time is very much of the essence for us and the Stylus Pro 7700 provided the right mix of speed and quality.” Sanders also considered the Stylus Pro 7900 but felt that because the SP7700 is faster it was more suited to point of sale work. With its 1440 x 1440 dpi resolution, image and text quality are more than sufficient for large format display production, and Epson’s UltraChrome ink set with Vivid Magenta technology gives a wide gamut suitable for reproducing both photographic product images and brand colours.
Quality and speed
“We had been using an office-type printer for smaller jobs and external digital print services for larger items, handing off jobs as PDFs, but the
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