Interview
We don’t just bring printing to new industries, we bring new industries to printing
Our editor Samuel Jones spoke to Stephen Davis, director of global marketing, Roland DG about all the announcements they made at FESPA in Barcelona this May.
Samuel: So, to start with, how was the show?
Stephen: FESPA was great for us. I’d imagine great for other people as well. But, the interesting thing was that it was back in Barcelona, the first time it’s been in Spain for a number of years, compared with the Netherlands and Germany in recent years. So, we didn’t really know how it was going to perform for us.
I think it was quite interesting and the team were very optimistic, but equally trying to be realistic at the same time in terms of what we might get out of the show. I think it beat all expectations.
I have yet to see the footfall or attendance numbers from FESPA but, certainly from our perspective, we had enormous interest in our new product range that was on display. We beat our leads target by about 100 per cent, which is fantastic. So, overall, really, really, really good show. And I think the opportunity for us to showcase our new brand refresh alongside new products was a win-win.
Samuel: I was going to actually bring that up next. Was that the main announcement
that you took out there, the brand refresh? Can you tell me just a little bit more about that? Stephen: Yeah, so the brand refresh has been something we’ve been playing with for a couple of years. We know that, we’ve got to compete against sometimes bigger companies in the marketplace. And really, how do we stand out and get that point of difference?
I think within the industry, you see a lot of very familiar taglines, even colourways that you see, across all of the stands. And so, what makes Roland different? And Roland DG is really, I think, still, we’re in the position where we’re a challenger brand, we can do things differently.
But we’ve got to stand for something. And so “Make Your Mark”, which is the tagline that we’ve developed, is really an articulation of the brand position. And we spoke to something like 18,000 customers over the last several months in surveys. We did a lot of research talking to our dealer network and also internal stakeholders around the world. And the thing that consistently came back was our customers’ pride in the work that they
do, in the output that they make using our technology.
The ability for them to actually do jobs for some leading brands. We’ve got customers all over the world working for high-end consumer brands and the reason that they can do that, they attribute to Roland DG and the technology we provide. But I think it’s that sense of achievement, real pride in what you do and how you “make your mark”. It’s a personification, I guess, of that pride and the ability to make a lasting impression.
We then stressed tested it around the world to see whether it meant the same thing in Japanese and can travel into German, French and Italian and every other language around the world. And whilst there were a couple of nuances that we needed to tweak, the sentiment pretty much travelled, so we’re pretty happy with that.
You may have seen in some of the visuals as well, that we’ve also brought in a lot more of a kind of human element into our branding. And so it really is celebrating end customers that are doing the work.
Samuel: And is that something that you think is important? That more, softer side? I guess, everything’s changing, isn’t it? Stephen: Everything’s changing and continues to evolve. I think what we noticed and heard anecdotal feedback on last week at FESPA, was that we’ve done a great job. All of our partners and customers on the stand thought, we look different to the other competitors in the market and we were busy.
I mean, I can’t put that all down to a brand refresh, but the stand was absolutely jumping. So, we definitely created that sense of here’s something new from Roland DG. We’re gearing up for the future. And I think, the embodiment of that is around the new brand refresh.
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May/June 2026
www.convertermag.com
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