In the Loupe

2013 Issue 2 Contents

• Playing the name game
• Carbon offsets
• Dimensional admail
• PharmaSolutions
• Kitting
• Textured Print
• Repositionable Notes
• Customer indicia from Canada Post
• Lunch and Learn sessions
• Earth Day cleanup
• Pancake breakfasts sponsored by the staff charities committee

Download the Mississauga version here.
Download the Ottawa version here.

 2013 Issue 1 Contents

• Multi-channel marketing the NHL way
•  ClingZ
• Memorable die-cuts
• Wide-format printing
• Lenticular printing
• Augmented reality
• QR Codes
• Sustainability Report
• What do marketers know about us?
• Lunch and Learn sessions
• Ward Griffin named 2012 Printing Leader of the Year
• One billion impressions on the Rotoman
• Christmas gifts purchased by the staff charities committee

Download the Mississauga version here.
Download the Ottawa version here.

His simple formula — “Bloom where you’re planted” — struck a chord with me because it explained an attitude I had witnessed in many different situations over the years. Wherever I’ve worked, there have been people who have radiated commitment to their cause and joy in their work. In the words of Bill Barnett, they have treated their work life as a calling, rather than as a job or a career.

Barnett notes that people with a ‘jobs’ mindset work only for the money, find little meaning in what they do, and tend to be dissatisfied with their work life. Careerists seek “advancement, pay, and prestige”; they are happy if they think they are winning. The people with callings behave differently: they emphasize service and craftsmanship, and they de-emphasize money; success follows them, though, because they can deliver superior results over an extended period of time.

A couple of examples stand out in my experience:

• Many years ago, I worked for Ralph Goodale when he was Member of Parliament for Assiniboi, Saskatchewan. Ralph was in his mid-twenties at the time. He treated his career in politics as a calling: he worked gruelling hours, he travelled constantly to all parts of his large constituency, and he immersed himself in public policy. Over the years, Ralph has gone on to win some elections and to lose others; he has held high office and he’s been in the political wilderness. At all times, he has been the happy warrior, serving a cause bigger than his career.

• An unassuming, dignified member of the Order of Canada, Jean Bélanger has devoted thirty years of volunteer work to Ottawa Foyers Partage, a group home in Ottawa. Since retiring from a productive career, during which he drafted ethical guidelines for the chemical industry, Jean has devoted himself to serving his community. He inspires everyone who knows him with his warm demeanor, his interest in new ideas, and his commitment to the causes he has embraced. Seeing Jean in action, I’m always inspired to think “I want to be like him when I grow up.”

In public life, in business or in community activities, blooming where you’re planted is one of the keys to lasting happiness. That attitude is its own reward; the success that follows is just a bonus.

The lesson learned is that accurate forecasting of print needs, whether using in-house or outsourced resources, is critical to keeping costs low and efficiency high.

What caused me to pause for reflection was the author’s assertion that customers who choose a third-party printer typically order 20% more product than they need. Rather than think ‘just in time‘ they think ‘just in case.’ If that is indeed the case, in-house production might make sense, but only if the cost comparison is accurate and there is no alternative to ordering from outside suppliers in larger quantities.

Customers can only know if in-house production makes sense if they compare fully-burdened costs of in-house printing to their external costs. Their cost calculations should include:

• Staffing: wages, benefits, supervision, reporting
• Overhead: floor space, electricity, racking, air conditioning
• Capital: purchase or lease costs
• Consumables and repairs: paper, ink, toner, service contracts
• Ancillary equipment: cutting, folding, inserting

Often, when I’ve been involved in discussions with customers, they have counted the cost of paper and ink or toner but have not taken the other costs into consideration.

The printing industry has an alternative for customers who may be tempted to buy more copies than they need. Dealing with a supplier who has digital print capabilities eliminates the need to over-order: the initial order can be restricted to the forecasted need; if additional copies are required, they can be produced quickly and cost-effectively.

When accurate forecasting, disciplined purchasing habits and short-run production equipment are available to a purchaser, the result is a reduced burden on budgets and the environment.

Use the clean() function to remove leading apostrophes and unprintable characters from imported text data

When I import data from various systems, an apostrophe may appear at the start of a text string or non-printing characters may be embedded within the text. Fortunately, Excel’s clean() function removes both types of problems in two simple steps. The first step is to move to a blank cell and enter a formula which applies the clean() function to the original data; the second step is to copy the result of the formula to the clipboard and use the paste special function to enter the value of the formula. The cleaned data can be placed in a new cell or pasted over the original cell.

Applying the clean() function in two steps

In the example above, the formula bar in row 1 shows the apostrophe at the beginning of cell C1. In row 2, the formula bar shows the formula “=CLEAN(C1)” which produces the text is cell D1. In row 3, the formula bar shows that after pasting the value of cell D1 into cell E1, the apostrophe is gone.

Convert numbers which have been formatted as text into numeric values

Importing data from some sources may result in numbers being formatted as text. Even though they make looks like numbers to the user, Excel is not able to use the text data in numerical functions. In the image at right, the values in A1 and A3 are formatted as text; the small green triangle in the upper left corner of those cells alerts the user to this fact. In cell A4, the formula attempts to add the values in A1, A2 and A3, but it is clear that only A2 is included in the result.

To convert a number that is formatted as text back into a numeric value, copy the contents of an empty cell to the clipboard, right-click on the cell containing the text, choose “Paste special” from the context menu and then select the “Add” option. The text will become a number automatically. The image below shows how to select the “Add” operation after right-clicking and choosing “Paste special”. 

Add sequence numbers the easy way

Often, I’m called upon to add a column of sequence numbers to the data. A simple short-cut is available. In the image at right, four rows of data are held in column B. In column C, sequence numbers were added from one to four; in column A, the sequence numbers were arbitrarily started at 95, for the sake of illustration. The same method was used to produce the numbering in columns A and C; only the starting numbers were different. The result is in the lower half of the illustration.

The shortcut is to insert the first two numbers of the sequence at the top of the rows to be numbered, select  the two numbers and then double-click on the lower-right corner of the selection. In the upper half of the image, you can see that the cursor has the shape of a plus sign when it hovers over the lower-right corner. Double-clicking inserted the numbers 97 and 98 into A3 and A4. The sequencing stopped automatically when it encountered a blank row of data.

Concatenating fields and text into a single string

Often, names are broken into three or more fields — first, middle and last names — but they have to be presented as a single string for some reason. The simple method is to use two functions: concatenate() joins the values in cells and arbitrary text in the order called in the function; trim() removes leading spaces, following spaces, and spaces created by empty fields. In the example below, the formula links the first name, middle initial and last name in that order, separated by spaces; the trim() function removes the extra space that would appear between “Tom” and “Smith” in D2, and between “Peter” and “Johnson” in cell D4.

Dollco is one of the storied companies in the Ottawa region, having received its charter in 1918 as the Dominion Loose Leaf Company. Over the years, its staff and management have earned the respect, not only of their customers, but also of their competitors.

Over the years, Lowe-Martin has been involved in many competitions against Dollco, winning some and losing some. In every case, the competition has been marked by professionalism and integrity.

As they turn the page on their notable history, Dollco employees in every part of the company can take pride in the legacy they built. And they can be assured that their new environment will give them every opportunity to succeed and grow in their profession.

It’s an exciting moment in the history of Lowe-Martin. To all our new colleagues, a heartfelt “Welcome to the team.”

The archivists who organized and tended the records were as impressive as the documents themselves. Unfailingly, they found the records I asked for and delivered them almost before I was ready to work with them.

Since that time, I’ve become a pack rat. I keep books, old documents and pictures because of the pleasure they give me by triggering memories of events I’ve participated in and people I’ve known. In a way, they form the scrapbook of my mind. Now, another type of scrapbook has entered my life: I Googled my name and found all sorts of memory triggers, some expected and others undreamed of.

First, the expected items: links to this blog, my Linked-In profile, my Twitter profile and comments I had left on other blogs. Then there were the books. Jill Bobula has generously listed me as an editor of her remarkable We are Powerful children’s books, so my name appears in numerous links to libraries and educational resources. I had served as editor for G.D. Mitchell’s anecdotal history of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, RCHA – Right of the Line, which led to links at Amazon and numerous military history resources. Finally, there were references to my membership in various associations, including the Heidelberg Digital Imaging Association, the Knights of Columbus and my home parish.

Less expected were links to the history of my home town, the cemetery records listing many of my relatives, obituary notices of family members and even a reference to the honours paper I wrote at the University of Regina. A scan of the birth announcement my wife and I put into the Ottawa Citizen when our elder son was born brought back particularly poignant memories.

Totally unexpected, though, was the link to footnotes in a book published in 1996 by the University of Toronto. During my days at the Archives in the mid-1980′s, I had met a young professor from the University of Saskatchewan who was conducting research into the history of residential schools in Canada; I casually mentioned that some of the records I had been reviewing might pertain to his research. We didn’t meet again. More than a decade later, Professor James R. Miller published Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. In two footnotes, he acknowledged our brief conversation, giving me credit for the reference to records he undoubtedly would have found without any assistance from me. Discovering these footnotes was remarkable. Sixteen years after the fact, Google had drawn my attention to an act that spoke eloquently about the integrity and generous spirit of a dedicated historian.

How does Google compare to the archivists? It may retrieve its information more quickly than the archivists, but it is much less discriminating. To get through the listings that referred to me, I had to wade through great numbers of near misses and mistaken identities. However, that’s not the important comparison. How does it compare to my own record-keeping? Very well indeed for the items that make their way into the public domain. The surprise is how much information actually leaks and the extent of the character sketch that could be constructed. And for my own interest, Google will be at least an extra page in my mental scrapbook.

Canadian penny to be retired

What’s a penny worth? When I was a youngster, a penny meant the world to me. With a single penny, I could buy a handful of mojos or three jawbreakers; the jawbreakers were a special treat because three of them could be made to last an entire afternoon.

Yesterday, we learned that the penny is to be retired, leaving traces only in our popular culture and the memories of once-young lads who remember the sweetness of a summer afternoon eating jawbreakers under a bright prairie sky.

Like the proverbial bad penny that shows up everywhere, references to pennies can be found throughout the culture. Have you ever asked, “A penny for your thoughts?” or described someone as a bad penny or had the penny drop when you solved a problem? How many people have made a bad situation worse while reassuring themselves by saying “in for a penny, in for a pound”? Or left the room to spend a penny?

Our grandfathers told us to save our pennies. Our mothers reminded us that a penny saved is a penny earned. Accountants reassured us that if we looked after our pennies, the dollars would look after themselves. People who didn’t take that advice usually died without a penny to their name, while their penny-pinching competitors went to their graves in silk-lined coffins. A few people got rich buying penny stocks, while those who were penny-wise but pound-foolish ended badly.

We watched movies, listened to songs and followed a TV series called “Pennies from Heaven”; some of us followed the Beatles down Penny Lane; and a few of us took in The Threepenny Opera.

Maybe in a quiet moment tonight, I’ll slip on my penny loafers and take another stroll under that long-lost prairie sky, pondering the meaning of the world in three jawbreakers and a shiny penny.

Do I need another list?

Lists, lists, lists! I have so many lists that I’ve had to develop a list of lists, just to keep things straight. Our culture promotes list-mania. From life coaches to self-help authors to late-night comedians, everyone pushes a list: 10 foods to avoid, 10 foods for a healthier you, 10 foods that make absolutely no difference to your health. Don’t miss the 10 books you have to read, the 10 hi-res images that will dress up your web pages, the 10 tips that will help you master Excel, the 10 things you have to know to raise your children right.  And don’t forget your bucket list.

In business, lists are practical. I couldn’t get along without my lists of goals, targets, priorities, commitments, and tasks. While it’s easy enough to ignore, prune or adapt lists from the general culture, lists in our work environment are hardier creatures. They’re like the dandelions that have taken over so much of the green space in the city: in isolation, a dandelion is beautiful to look at; when countless dandelions colonize a park, the effect is a lot less pleasing. In business, when lists beget lists, perspective and priorities get choked out by the numberless tasks that colonize our day.

Peter Bregman offered some timeless advice in a Harvard Business Review blog post about how to weed our lists. The answer is in another list, of course. This list, though, tracks the things that we should not be doing.

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn’t make you happy? What’s not important to you? What gets in the way? 

On the personal level, Bregman’s advice can be hard to follow. The world is such a rich place, with so many fascinating things to see, read or experience. We discover talents we didn’t recognize earlier in life. Responsibilities come our way, whether or not we ask for them. How can we not develop those talents and discharge those responsibilities?

In our work lives, it’s even harder to develop and be guided by a ‘no’ list. The most trivial tasks can be presented to us as fundamentally important. Our colleagues may need help only we can provide. Our customers may put temptation in our way.

To attempt everything is to guarantee that the dandelions will take over. To create a well-considered ‘no’ list is an investment in the green spaces of our lives and careers.

Mike Landers specializes in delighting his customers.

Last week, an email from a customer contained a ransom demand — $1 million in unmarked bills — for the safe return of Mike Landers, one of our account managers. No, Mike had not been kidnapped. He had just delivered one of the most inspiring examples of customer service I’ve witnessed in twenty years in this industry; the customer’s ransom note was meant to draw our attention to Mike’s extraordinary effort.

Our customer, located in a city nearly three hours flying time from Ottawa, had designed an annual report for an organization. Unfortunately, delays crept into the project. On the day before the organization needed to distribute copies of its annual report at a shareholders meeting, the reports were still in production and only 200 were in a finished state.

Mike had been deeply involved in the project from the beginning and understood the time crunch. Sending 200 reports by air cargo that evening would solve the problem. But the evening flight was cancelled and the flight next morning had become fully booked.

In a replay of John Candy’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Mike sprang into action. He booked an early morning flight out of Toronto, took a short nap, picked up the 200 copies from the plant and drove overnight to Toronto, arriving in time for an early-morning, four-hour flight. A little jet-lagged, he delivered the annual reports with hours to spare. By any measure, his effort was extraordinary.

I’ve worked with Mike for nearly twenty years and have almost grown accustomed to his dedication and inventiveness. But then he takes a cliché — go the extra mile for your customer — and turns it into reality. Well done, Mike. By the way, if the ransom demand had been real, we would have passed the hat to get you back.

Charles Duhigg, whose article about how marketers profit from our habits was highlighted in a recent post, explains the mechanics of habit in his fast-paced book, The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business.¹ Duhigg describes the discovery that, when we undertake a new task, our brains become intensely active from the time we react to the first cue until we reach our goal and experience the reward associated with the activity.² If we repeatedly react to the cue in the same way, the pattern of our brain activity changes: our brains fire up only while we recognize the cue and again when enjoying the reward, but in the interim they become passive as we perform the habitual activity. Presumably, my brain reacts to the cue of the morning drive and puts me on autopilot until I arrive at the office, where it fires up again as I enjoy the rewards of my workday.

When the rewards are intense, a further change can take place. Instead of waiting to enjoy the reward until the habitual activity has been completed, our brains anticipate and begin to enjoy the reward before the activity has begun. We experience this shortcut as a craving. The descent into gambling addictions, for example, appears to be based on gradual transformation of habit into craving. In a recent study in which gamblers were asked to watch the bars on a slot machine, problem gamblers reacted strongly to any ‘win’ and almost as strongly to ‘near misses’. In practice, the near misses prompt gamblers to lay down another bet.³ Simply by programming slot machines to produce more near misses, casinos have been able to entice players to gamble, and lose, more money.

Fortunately for us, we are more than our habits. Duhigg explores the habit-changing methods of Alcoholics Anonymous to develop an understanding of how destructive habits can be overcome. Deliberate changes to routines and conscious resistance to cravings can help, but in times of stress the recovering addict needs the additional support of a dedicated group which shares the same goal. In other words, belonging to a community of like-minded people can help sustain a person’s decision to change habits.⁴ Contrast that with the casino which trains its employees to listen sympathetically to the life stories of problem gamblers with the intent of discovering and exploiting their weaknesses.⁵ Our mothers were right — it matters who we hang out with.

Is any of this new? Has it taken lab-coated researchers with sophisticated probes and imaging hardware to discover this? Actually, no. The researchers are providing material evidence that supports conclusion drawn centuries ago by Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and dozens of other philosophers and writers.⁶ Listen to Blaise Pascal:

For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result, demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us. How few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed.⁷

 Generally, we have a choice of two paths. On one path, developing virtues through careful thought and consistent practice eases our way; on the other path, unthinking development of injurious habits throws up obstacles at every turn. Whichever path we choose, the marketers will be watching.