Article Presentation for Audience Research on the New York Times Case Study involving Big D Custom Screen Printing and their switch to client targeting strategy.
1. A New York Times CaseStudy
Review by: Eli Williamson
2.
3. Big D Custom Screen Printing
T-shirt Printing
Austin, Texas
Darren Robbins (co-founder)
Dispute with business partner about pursuing smaller
orders instead of seeking large accounts exclusively
Price Rates
$5 a tee for orders of 40-499 shirts
$3.50 a tee for orders of 1000+ shirts
4. New York Times formally asked Darren’s question:
“Can chasing small customers lead to larger profits?”
Darren Robbins
Actually set out to test this approach with his company
and measured the results by annual financial reports
Darren’s Business Partner
Tested pursuing large accounts in hopes of larger profit
margins in the long run
5. Shifting the target consumer and lowering price rates
Public pricing (transparent pricing)
Could this cause a price war? – no, just nasty emails.
Annual Sales Reports
2008 - Year One: $325,000 (breaking even)
2009 - Year Two: $675,000 (more than double year one)
2010 - Year Three: $900,000 (nearly triple year one)
Overall take-away:
Chasing small customers can lead to larger profits
“Small-order customers account for roughly 60 percent of our
return business. Just as important — if not more — their positive
word-of-mouth accounts for 75 percent of our new
customers, including some of our largest.” – Darren Robbins
6. Limiting your targeted consumer to only large clients is a
poor decision in attempting to increase revenue
I can see how this may work for some larger, more established
businesses but not for small businesses and especially not
start-ups who don’t have a clientele yet
Objections
Inefficiencies in targeting small-order clients
More wasted product (color correction and test prints)
Study Weaknesses
Just examines just one business – a small start-up at that
One location (initially), inexperienced owners, shedding a business
partner after the first year (one less salary)
Are the results unique to just the screen printing industry?
7. Darren Robbins embarked on his business experiment with clear goals
as well as an accurate and paced method of measuring his new
approach’s success
Goal: To become profitable by catering to small printing orders
Accurate & Paced Measurements: Annual Sales Totals
Yes it is an article, but it is also a case study
The New York Times approached the formatting of the story as if it were
an experiment
Segmenting elements such as: the challenge, the background, the options, the
decision, and the results
Received insight from readers and other professionals to differentiate opinions on
whether Robbins’s decision was right
The New York Times released a follow up article a week after the original
was published
Contained results with concrete numbers in the annual sales reports that proved
the correlation between small-order focus and increased profitability in the screen
printing industry.