Printing industry addresses a pressing issue

Printing presses? Pah – yesterday's technology and an industrial dinosaur, right?
Wrong.
Chatting yesterday to a director of Polestar, one of Britain's biggest printing companies, two points dawned on me.
One is that the internet may well have breathed new life into an apparently old-fashioned concept, the home shopping catalogue.
The other is that the inexorable march of digital technology has brought forward a new generation of printing machinery that has turned an industry that had all the agility of a supertanker into a bit of a speed boat.
First, those catalogues. Most people reckoned they would die a quick death as the internet took hold, with websites displaying your favourite clothes or gadgets doing the job far better than a printed page.
If anything, the opposite has happened. Websites have proved a useful way of catching customers who decide that, instead of clicking their way through a website and waiting for all the pictures to load, they’ll order a catalogue.
Catalogues, remember, don't need batteries, plugs or a broadband connection.
Put that together with the huge growth of retail over the past few years, and the catalogue has become a key component in the way retailers stay in touch with customers too busy to hit the High Street.
The bigger challenge for the print industry is this: retailers and consumer businesses generally are constantly looking for ways of 'talking' to each customer personally.
They know that ten-a-penny marketing mailing stands a very high chance of talking to no more than the bottom of the dustbin. So they want to 'add value' by addressing people personally and talking to them about their own requirements.
Websites like Amazon and iTunes are among those that have developed algorithms that use your own buying behaviour to serve you up a personalised homepage that has already walked through the site and found things you might like a look at.
The printing machinery that Polestar has just spent £4 million on at its Sherwood Park site at Annesley is capable of using your data to do the same thing in print
So picture this: a gas bill that not only gives you the routine figures, but also has a full colour pie chart that tells you how much juice you and your family are burning through compared to the average customer and where you might make savings.
Suddenly, an impersonal demand for dosh is becoming helpful advice on how you, personally, might save money.
And a printing industry that some people might have written off has reinvented itself again.