Industry News
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ith a population of 578,000
spread over 114.7 square
kilometres, Vancouver is
Canada’s eighth largest city. It also boasts
Canada's largest and most diversified
port, trading $75 billion in goods annually
and is home to a number of different industries, including the mining, forest,
biotech, film and software industries.
If you’re a direct marketing supplier,
Vancouver offers easy access to a wide
variety of business sectors on local,
national and international levels. And
although not many head offices call this
west coast city home, Vancouver’s DM
community offers plenty of work to go
around.
“It’s not a huge market but it offers a lot
of opportunity,” says Mark Weeks, General
Manager of Integrated Direct Response
Services (IDRS). “A lot of business has gone
east (to Toronto) because the shops there
have better capabilities so suppliers here
have learned that he opportunities for
new business come from the specialized
services that they can provide.”
IDRS has found their niche in
translations for international clients and
currently offers in-house translation
services for German, French and Japanese.
At this time about 50% of their work is for
clients outside of North America.
“There is some competition on the
printing side for translation but not much
on the front end locally.”
Weeks also says that because of the
smaller market in Vancouver, pricing
among competitors is fairly similar as rival
suppliers are respectful of each other and
recognize that undercutting just drives
the market down.
“So this makes relationship
management with our clients even more
important.”
Karly Black, General Manager of
Datacore Mail Management Services, a
small letter shop in Vancouver proper,
agrees that although there is a lot of
competition in Vancouver’s DM industry,
there is also enough work to go around.
“There’s such a huge cross-section of
industries in Vancouver that there really
is something for everyone,” she says. “That being said, relationships are very
important here, more so than in other
markets I’ve worked in where price was
king. Price is important here to but the
ability to deliver on promises and build
customer loyalty trumps price.”
At Datacore, most business is
provincially-based but many of the
clients are national and run the gambit
from not-for-profit to national firms.
Most of Datacore’s growth in the last year
has been seen on the data service and
analytics side.
“Client resources are stretched so many
of them are relying on us to do work that
they may have previously done in-house – like the early stages of campaign
planning,” says Black.
Vancouver has enjoyed many years of
economic prosperity but 2009 proved
to be a tough year for many industries –
including direct marketing and 2009 saw
many DM efforts pulling back.
“Last year was pretty tough,” says
Gordon Taschuk, President and CEO of
Kirk Integrated Marketing Services Ltd., “especially on the print side but we’re
looking for 2010 to turn that around.”
According to Taschuk, while Vancouver
enjoyed the boom, clients didn’t have
to put a lot of thought into their DM
campaigns because the economy was
so good. But now they realize that with
limited budgets they have to be smarter
about it.
“Our clients are looking for more
strategy and creative help from us now
than ever before so from our perspective,
the DM industry is recovering quickly here
and performing fairly well right now.”
Timing is everything
A big advantage to doing business in
Vancouver, according to Kristjan Gibson,
is the overlapping time zones that allow
local businesses to effectively service
international clients.
“Vancouver is an ideal location for
dealing with international clients because
with the time zone differences we are
able to up and running during the regular
business hours of all our clients around
the world,” says Gibson, a Consulting
Manager with JR Direct a direct response
marketing company located in the tiny
suburb of Ladner.
JR Direct has only a handful of local
clients with most of their business coming
from outside of Canada.
PacNet Service, an international payment
processing company based in downtown
Vancouver since 1994, also enjoys the time
zone benefits as well as easy access to
Vancouver’s international airport.
“A very small percentage of our
clients are Canadian-based,” says Renee
Frappier. “Only about 10 per cent. Sixty
per cent are in the United States and the
remaining 30 per cent are outside North
America.
“In the morning I can talk to Europe and
then in the afternoon Asia comes online.
I can talk to everyone I need to talk to
globally during our regular business days.”
What all of PacNet’s clients have in
common is that they are marketing to
people outside of their own countries.
While many people have changed
to online payments and ecommerce,
Frappier says cheques are still a really
important payment method for DM,
an opinion backed up by 20 per cent
growth in PacNet’s business over the
last year.
Bucking the trend
Another Vancouver business bucking
the trend and showing positive growth
is Metropolitan Fine Printers, a high-end
printing house and the official printerof the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic
Games. One of the most awarded printers
in both Canada and the U.S., Metropolitan
prints anything weird and wonderful
for a variety of sectors. Because of their
reputation for excellence, about 65 per
cent of Metropolitan’s business comes
from advertising agencies.
All of this without leaving their own
back yard.
“The majority of our business is local
to Vancouver,” says Nikos Kallas, Business
Development Manager for the business
his father built from scratch. “We do very
little across Canada but do have clients in
Oregon and California.”
According to Kallas, business has been
booming at Metropolitan for the past
few years. He says that although the runs
are getting shorter due to the lagging
economy, they are getting more targeted
and more creative.
“People are mailing less but they’re
printing higher-end products,” he says.
Frank Ferrucci of Mail-O-Matic in
Burnaby has also been having a banner
year, thanks in part to the variety of
services his company has to offer.
“We’re not just a letter shop and I think
that clients sometimes forget about all of
the other things we can do,” says Ferrucci,
whose company has expanded to meet
the growing needs of its client base.
Mail-O-Matic, apart from mail prep, data
processing and direct addressing, also
offers extensive back-end analysis and
database management services to clients
that span a variety of sectors – including
not-for-profit.
“The great thing about not-for-profit
work is that when things are good, they
mail lots. And when things are bad, they
mail lots.”
Harvey McKinnin Associates has built
their entire business on not-for-profit
clients all over the country. With offices in
Vancouver and Toronto, this firm is able to
service clients on a national scale.
“We have no problem servicing our
national clients from Vancouver,” says
Lynn Boardman, Managing Director. “But our Toronto office also allows us
to have a local presence in a market
that would sometimes prefer to meet
face-to-face rather than proof material
over email.”
According to Boardman, the not-forprofit
sector is very important to the
DM industry in Vancouver because the
budgets tend to be more stable. And
although the last 18 to 24 months have
been hard on the sector, things have
started to pick up lately.
“DM continues to work well for our
clients because it allows them to raise
money and build relationships,” she says. “The real value is in converting one-time
donors into monthly givers.”
Surprisingly, Harvey McKinnon doesn’t
have to share Vancouver’s NFP sector
with other local suppliers as Broadman
says most of the competition comes from
Ontario.
On the software side of DM,
Vancouver is home to top companies
like ResponseTek and Tetrad Computer
Applications Inc. – both of which
use Vancouver as a home base for an
international client base.
For ResponseTek, Vancouver
businesses account for only five per cent
of their clients while Tetrad does about 80
per cent of their business stateside.
The self-proclaimed “supermarket of
data”, Tetrad was the genious behind
P-Census, a software application that
combines the Canadian and U.S. census
information with popular mapping
platforms to allow direct marketers to
perform heavy-duty analysis of their
consumer base.
Companies like McDonalds and
Blockbuster use P-Census to determine
the best locations for new retail outlets
and to determine the type of promotional
that will be most effective for particular
areas.
Looking forward
As Vancouver begins to recover from the
economic downturn, and with a new
influx of money into the local economy
thanks to the recent Olympic Games,
members of the DM community have
high hopes for 2010.
“It’s been a tough year for many
companies but for some, because of the
Olympics, they’re looking forward to their
best year yet (in 2010),” says Karly Black. “It just depends on where you are on the
food chain. Personally, I’ve always felt that
being somewhere near the bottom where
everything comes together is a lovely
place to be as long as you are proactive
rather than reactive.”
Black believes that the DM industry in
Vancouver will continue to strengthen
as people stop dwelling on the recession
and begin anticipating good things to
come.
And according to Gordon Taschuk,
west coast DM suppliers will continue to
thrive not by stealing clients from their
competitors but instead by looking at
how they can expand their services to
offer better value to their clients.
It really is relationship marketing at its
best.