For more than 50 years, Gordon Bernard, a printing company
For more than 50 years, Gordon Bernard, a printing company
For more than 50 years, Gordon Bernard, a printing company in Milford, Ohio, has focused exclusively on printing fund-raising calendars for a variety of clients, like cities, schools, scout troops, and fire departments. The company’s approximately 4,000 clients nationwide, 10 percent of which have been with the company since its inception, generated $4 million in revenue in 2006. In order to better serve customers, company president Bob Sherman invested $650,000 in the purchase of a Xerox iGEN3 digital color press so that the company could produce in-house a part of its calendar product that had been outsourced. The high-tech press has done more for the company than simply reduce costs, however. The new press gives the company four-color printing capability for the first time in its history, and that has led the management of Gordon Bernard to rethink the company’s strategy. The machine excels at short runs, which means that small batches of an item can be printed at a much lower cost than on a traditional press. The press also has the capability to customize every piece that rolls off the machine. For example, if a pet store wants to print 3,000 direct-mail pieces, every single postcard can have a personalized greeting and text. Pieces targeted to bird owners can feature pictures of birds, whereas the dog owners’ brochure will contain dog pictures. Text and pictures can be personalized for owners of show dogs or overweight cats or iguanas. Bob Sherman has created a new division to oversee the implementation, training, marketing, and creative aspects of the new production process. The company has even changed how it thinks of itself. No longer does Gordon Bernard consider itself a printing firm, but as a marketing services company with printing capabilities. That change in strategy is prompting the company to seek more commercial work. For example, Gordon Bernard will help clients of its new services develop customer databases from their existing information, and identify additional customer information they might want to collect. Even though calendar sales account for 97 percent of the firm’s revenues, that business is seasonal and leaves large amounts of unused capacity in the off-peak periods. Managers hope to see the new division contribute 10 percent of total revenue in the next couple of years.5Critical Thinking Questions What type of planning do you think Gordon Bernard is doing? Because Gordon Bernard’s strategy changed only after it purchased the iGEN3, does the shift constitute strategic planning? Why or why not?
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