MFSA Fulfillment Conference 2009: How to become a Marketing Services Provider
I remember it well! The strategic concept of Marketing Services Provider was first presented at the MFSA Fulfillment Conference 2002 in Memphis by Mr. Chuck Blakeman, the Marketing and Business Development Manager for Denver’s Holden Marketing Support Services. His intention was to acknowledge the potential role of three separate Holden businesses – printing, fulfillment, and mailing – to function as an integrated, cohesive whole in providing the necessary production tasks for clients’ corporate marketing campaigns. It was a rebranding of Holden’s business to their market but also a rallying cry of a new direction for his employees. (See Fulfillment Conference highlights article on clintbolte.com for more complete discussion.)
In subsequent years every national and regional conclave of graphic communications entrepreneurs gathering under the PIA, NAPL, IPA, DMIA (now PSDA), etc., etc. banners jumped on the band wagon beating the drum to the same tune as originally delineated at this early millennium MFSA Fulfillment conference. MSP momentum mounted as software vendors introduced increasingly sophisticated Internet applications – some later to be dubbed web to print - and the digital print engine manufacturers poured mega bucks into proclaiming the logarithmic response improvement from variable data printing and multi-media marketing programs.
Not surprising, there appears to be few firms left to convince of the obvious benefits of abandoning the commodity production-centric models in favor of the more service-centric, client friendly implication of a Marketing Services Provider. A key problem remaining is the only folks who seem to know how to get to the Promised Land are vendors who have hired “independent” consultants to author white papers on the various elements comprising the MSP. That is … until the MFSA Fulfillment Conference 2009 just concluded in Tampa. This conclave concentrated on numerous case studies presented by proven MSPs, which described for attendees how their firms became Marketing Services Providers. This article will exam the lessons shared.
