Every year printing companies in Canada are receiving government tax credits or cheques adding up to millions courtesy of the SR&ED (Scientific Research & Experimental Development) tax credit, a federal tax incentive program, administered by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) encouraging businesses of all sizes and in all sectors to conduct R&D. Is your business one of them? If not, you need to learn about this. Attendees at the Digital Imaging Association’s meeting on April 20 were able to do just that.
Doug Picklyk – Canadian Printer magazine – DIA’s Technical Committee Chair – provided an overview of the SR&ED program and also lead a discussion about the positive experiences some DIA member companies have had with the program.
Jana Lucatch – president, Magnum Fine Commercial Printing and member of the DIA board – shared her company’s recent experiences both with the program and with Service Optiprint Inc., a company offering SR&ED application assistance specifically to the printing industry, since 2000.
Some background
Over a decade ago, the federal government recognized a productivity lag in Canada relative to some other countries. Thus, a program was developed to encourage innovation and to promote Canada’s research and development. Today this program pays out $4 billion a year to the Canadian industry. Do you qualify? The answer is a resounding YES.
You only need to have encountered a technological challenge that you couldn’t solve with information readily available in the public domain. If you tried to resolve the challenge with a systematic approach, you are very likely eligible for the credit. It does not have to be a unique problem to the industry, but does need to be unique in your shop.
Jana Lucatch shared information on the project that netted Magnum a return. She assured attendees at the DIA meeting that what printers often deem the everyday systematic approach to the experimentation related to challenges of meeting customer expectations is really innovation.
Normal trial and error, documentation of materials and labour (Magnum tracks all of this with their job dockets) submission = tax credit. Bonus – you don’t need to succeed to earn the tax credit; you just need to show you did the R&D. Another bonus – if the tax credit goes beyond your actual tax, then you receive cash for the balance.
Technical report required
Making a claim does require a technical report and good documentation of your costs and activities. There are many consultants available who specialize in this process – typically working on a contingency fee basis. Lucatch advised DIA listeners that Magnum had investigated consultant options and chose Service Optiprint – www.optiprint.ca. She informed the audience about the depth of Magnum’s experience with Optiprint’s consultancy. Other DIA audience participants concurred that Optiprint was a viable option because the company specializes in the printing industry, providing a turn-key service for the SR&ED tax credit program to a broad range of businesses within the graphic arts industry.
Here’s how it works:
- Meet with senior management and consultants to identify qualifying projects
- Meet with production staff, collect data, begin reporting process
- Clarify and finalize reporting details
- Completed report reviewed by senior managers
- Submit report and await return
Lucatch advised DIA listeners that Magnum’s staff is given books to record their production activities because it is very hard to track information down afterwards. And remember, she said further, in a manufacturing environment there is tax credit opportunity any time you have a challenge of any kind in any work area.
The DIA presenters reminded the audience that these are bottom line dollars. The bottom line for our government is that they are trying to show that Canada is innovative and technologically oriented.
Software is a huge qualifier – an appropriate segway to the second DIA presenter of the evening.
PRACTICAL INTEGRATED MARKETING
Wrich Printz, president and CEO of L2 Inc., based in San Jose, California, demystified the complexity behind cross-media technology and integrated multi-channel marketing solutions. Printz’s presentation delivered some real world examples of print mixing with mobile and the web “without the science fiction.” Then, he illustrated in plain English how to share this understanding with your clients and capture their business.
L2 Inc. started as a print brokerage company. They developed software to manage business for their clients. They were advised, said Printz, by companies like Xerox and Creo, to evolve their business and become a software company. So, he told DIA listeners, they took the code they had written to make their lives easier and turned it into a real product to become a technology partner to marketing service providers. Their product is called Fuse. It allows users to launch all integrated marketing from one platform – all driven by a database.
Definitions
Multi channel – the ability to market to different people through different channels.
Cross media – the ability to send these folks over here print and those people over there email.
Multi media – the ability to send people the right message on the right device with the right content at the right time.
Customer Total Value – A customer not only delivers a measured value, but can convince other people to spend money with you as well. The snowball effect of this, Printz told the DIA audience, can become extraordinary. So, he said further, as we are looking at integrated media, it is not just about reaching and contacting people. It’s also about allowing them to continue that campaign in whatever form that is going to happen.
Printz’s key objective with his presentation to the DIA meeting ultimately focused on how to implement and manage marketing campaigns to keep the revenue flowing for both service providers and their clients.
The importance of print
Printz’s personal belief is that there is no more important component to the Customer Total Value dynamic than print. Print is going to move into a reward business. Consumers will be rewarded when they get print. Printz provided an example of a business that is highly focused on print, called birthdaypack.com. The company mails a number of printed coupons to a specific demographic on or before their birthday. To redeem the carefully selected coupons, recipients need to register in person. Printz shared the extraordinary success rate for redemption, for permission to send other materials and for the amount of money spent over and above the coupon value.
It’s not science fiction
You need to understand, said Printz, that integrated marketing is not science fiction. It is about being practical. If you’ve never done integrated marketing before, start with something simple. Mail something out to a target audience directing people to visit a web landing page where you will capture their email addresses. Use the email address with discretion to offer something your demographic will actually use and/or welcome information about. Do it for yourself and then let your customers know what you did. Printz offered the DIA audience the opportunity to talk with him directly to get his assistance and some tools – at no charge – to develop this type of campaign and to experience the power that can be derived.
The next step is to drive something with mobile. Right now there are eight billion cell phones on the planet, even though many are old and inactive. But there are eight billion cell phones making this the number one way of interacting with people today. QR codes are a strong example of print interacting with other media. QR codes need to go on print. That means, said Printz, that the worlds’ most populous computing device can use print to drive people to websites. “I don’t know,” he said to DIA listeners, “why people are so sad about the disappearance of print when the dominant form of computing has the ability to pick up and quickly read print.” This has made print relevant, in his mind, for the next 20 years.
So the first step in taking advantage of this opportunity to deliver customer-focused results is to assess the needs of your customer(s). Ultimately, what the customer really wants to get out of a campaign is sales.
Success is based on demographics, geographics, psychographics.
- Demographics – who you are
- Geograpahics – where you are
- Psychographics – why you are and what you do
Wrich Printz shared two Toyota campaign examples with the DIA audience, complete with design and delivery details, the tracked results of each campaign and Toyota’s decision about which campaign to repeat – again and again. He also showed some demo applications and encouraged listeners to use them for their own campaigns, either for themselves and/or for their customers.
Printz concluded that print is not going away. It is changing. You can drive the change in your customers and be rewarded for helping them win.
The Digital Imaging Association thanks PaperlinX for hosting the evening’s presentations, Service Optiprint for providing information about SR&ED, and Konica Minolta for sponsoring Wrich Printz.
