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November 2006 - Business consumers consider several factors when purchasing their office papers. But it is possible to categorize paper shoppers into some general groups:
- Price Shopper
- Brand Shopper
- Environmental Shopper
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| Price Shopper |
| Price is always a purchase consideration, but some buyers shop on price alone. They want the lowest price, always. Period and end of story. The nice thing about these shoppers is that it is easy to influence their purchase decision, just give them the lowest price. Of course the downside is that these are the least loyal and lowest margin shoppers you’ll run into. |
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Lowest Price
Low
High
Provide the lowest cost
Margin challenges and loyalty |
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| Brand Shopper |
| On the flip side of the loyalty coin from the Price Shopper, Brand Shoppers are very loyal… to a specific brand. They’ve tried a product; it worked well, so now all they want to do is re-purchase that item. They will consider price, but for the most part if you carry their brand at a fair price you’ll get the business. Many times the brand is tied to the printing equipment they use, so it will be an OEM like HP or Xerox. |
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Brand Name
High to the brand
Medium
Carry their brand at a fair price
Hard to switch to a different brand if you don’t happen to carry theirs |
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| Environmental Shopper |
| A smaller segment, but one with terrific margin opportunities, Environmental Shoppers are willing to pay more for recycled products because they are “environmentally friendly.” While many office papers contain some percentage of recycled products, the Environmental Shopper generally looks for papers with at least 30% post-consumer waste content. Many government/tax supported agencies will specify recycled paper. |
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Recycled Content
High to recycled papers
Low to Medium
Provide a good assortment of recycled paper
Much less selection available in recycled papers, harder to find in all grades |
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Up-sell Opportunities
There are effective approaches to up-selling each type of shopper. Regardless of their motivation, yours should be to maximize profitability while providing value to your customer. Here are some thoughts on how you can accomplish this.
Price Shoppers Are Penny-Wise
It is possible to appeal to a Price Shopper’s thriftiness to up-sell them into a higher margin paper… but only in certain situations. For example, if your cost-conscious customer has an important proposal or presentation to print, they don’t want to be penny wise but a pound foolish by using low-end paper. The importance of how the proposal looks, its impact, should outweigh to a certain degree a Price Shopper’s natural frugalness enough for you to demonstrate how affordable presentation quality paper can be.
There are more details to this approach in the feature entitled “Tips for High Margin Paper Sales” available on PaperRap.com but the basic logic is this: it only costs a penny more per sheet to use high-end paper. You can convince your Price Shoppers that a penny is a wise investment when their presentation or proposal is important enough that it has to make a big impression.
Brand Shoppers Will Fish Upstream
The thing about Brand Shoppers is that they are loyal to their brand. So take advantage of their loyalty to show them premium papers in their brand family. As with the Penny-Wise Price Shoppers, there are circumstances in which your customers will want to use the best paper available such as for a print-on-demand marketing piece, company profile, product sales sheets, or presentations.
Many brands offer paper in multiple grades. For example, Hammermill offers commodity copy paper, premium color copy, quality laser, excellent ink jet, etc. So if your customer is brand loyal to Hammermill, but is stuck on commodity Hammermill Tidal, show them the other papers in the Hammermill stable through samples (available on PaperRap.com) and they are more likely to purchase upstream (as long as those papers are affiliated with their preferred brand).
Environmental Shoppers Want More
From the Environmental Shopper’s point of view, the more recycled content the better. The most common “recycled” paper has 30% post consumer waste. But there are 50% and even 100% recycled papers available that you can present. Generally the higher the recycled content, the greater the margin opportunity. Paper mills are also introducing more recycled papers in premium grades such as color copy and high-bright multipurpose.
Help Is Available
If you would like help learning more about maximizing margins for your various types of paper shopping customer types, it is available. One source of help is to participate in the on-line Paper University on PaperRap.com. There is an entire module on the different types of paper shoppers. For “live” help, contact a United Stationers Paper Specialist at (888) PAPER60 or email PaperRap@ussco.com. |
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