Brochure Printing In Danger of Collapse
A massive dip in the amount that readers in the UK are spending is of great concern to media publishers and printers alike. In the first six months of this year consumption of traditional media, such as newspapers and magazines dropped by over 19% and spending on subscription to online magazines plummeting by an incredible 48%. With readers flocking to free online versions of newspapers and magazines, publishers are finding it difficult to persuade readers to buy the physical medium.
With the popularity of online holiday sites increasing, there has been a steady decline in the demand for the glossy holiday brochure printing, and so the prospect of publishers reducing actual magazine numbers is not a pleasant one for the printing companies that hold those contracts. The outlook for print material is bleak. In a survey undertaken by YouGov, which polled over 1000 consumers, found that only 9.8 % would consider paying for any type of media, real or electronic, in the coming year.
The news worsens, when this group were further queried, less than one third were prepared to pay for news media. Overall this means that only 3% of those surveyed will consider becoming new customers. The two media that people were more prepared to pay for were music and film. News Corp hoped their decision to charge for the online version of both The Times and The Sunday Times would recoup some of their losses, but the simple fact is that generic news is much too freely available to expect many people to pay for it from a particular source.
The only areas where charging for online media is acceptable, are for specialised or copyrighted material. Even this is going to be available to those who know how, torrent download sites for example (though this is more often used for the illegal download of audio or video files). One type of reader who seems to have remained loyal to physical media is plane, train and bus commuters. There were a number of reasons cited for this, laptop battery wear and patchy mobile broadband being the most common.
While companies looking to promote their products will continue to offer work to flyer, catalogue and brochure printing companies, they will be looking for the most competitive rates, so squeezing the profit margin of the printers even further. In the current economic climate, people are going to be reluctant to fork out for material that they can access at no cost.
ISO 9001
When an organisation considers making adjustments to its quality management practices, the goal is usually to fulfil customer expectations. There are many tools to use in order to make the best company-wide changes possible, always keeping the customer in the forefront of considerations. One tool to rule them all is certainly the ISO 9001 standard. It is a systematic framework that can manage any organisation’s processes in order to maximise product improvement and, thus, customer satisfaction.
The ISO 9001 standard is also flexible enough to work for organisations of any size from small businesses to multinational corporations. This standard maps out the requirements that must be met but leave the ways they are met to each organisation. This maintains a tremendous amount of flexibility so that the framework can work equalling well across the complete spectrum of business sectors as well as cultures and locales.
One important requirement of the ISO 9001 standard is for each organisation that uses it to audit its own ISO 9001 quality system. This serves as a solid verification that the organisation has successfully adjusted its own processes effectively. It is also a further action towards the goal of being in comprehensive control of company-wide activities.
The organisation also has the option to invite its client to audit its quality system and, in this way, further ensure that the company is ready and able to deliver products and services that will meet their needs and preferences. Finally, an incredibly popular option for companies and organisations to follow up with is the use of an independent quality system certification body to obtain an ISO 9001 certificate of conformity. This last option is valuable due to the perceived objectivity of the reviewers. In today’s extremely competitive economic climate, it makes sense to make any effort to gain customer loyalty and company-wide efficiency. ISO 9001 can help on both of those fronts.