Following the news that Xerox had acquired UK-based print and digital marketing communication services provider, Go Inspire, it has provided detailed insight into the decisive strategic move. The acquisition has widened the scope of its digital and customer engagement portfolios – while supporting the transformation of its transactional and direct mail services into truly multi-channel communications platforms.
Darren Cassidy, UK and Ireland Managing Director and senior vice president, EMEA Global Document Services at Xerox
“Xerox is acquisitive by nature as an organisation. At the macro level, the position is that the print industry has been consolidating and Xerox’s view is that we want to be part of that consolidation. We’re not going to allow it to happen around us; we’re going to be part of the positive moves in the print side of the industry.”
To date, Xerox’s business has been in the outbound services arena – typically, managing the delivery and support of cutting-edge print and digital communication technologies – and it has achieved considerable success in doing so.
“We believe this is undoubtedly an area where we have more value to add,” continues Darren, who emphasises: “It’s an area where clients are now wanting to be more directive and clearer about how they scrutinise data, create their campaigns, and they want to measure the ROI very carefully. As a consequence, they’re looking at those providers who can deliver a lot of the solution – whether it’s data management, creation of the campaigns, or delivery of the marketing that goes with it. That includes whether it’s the physical print delivery mechanism or digital, or whether they combine print and digital. And I strongly believe that it should be print and digital not print or digital.”
Darren elaborates: “We’ve got our own delivery centres, but we believed it was the right time for us to invest into the capabilities, not only to harden our core delivery capabilities in the print space, but mainly because we really wanted to take a leap forward and take a bigger step in the digital management and digital support space.”
Regarding the choice of Go Inspire to help take this forward, Darren comments: “Go Inspire is an extremely well run print orientated business that has been making investments steadily over the past six or seven years to become more than just a print provider; and they’ve done a really good job. We really liked their story and the capabilities that they have.
“We like that they’ve augmented in the digital areas where we needed strengths. We’re very strong in inbound, some components of the outbound knowledge forms of the data side, and some of the areas that Go Inspire was in, so there was a really good fit for us – not just in terms of the capabilities they could bring to us, but also what we could bring to them. We also really liked their client base; in the high end/enterprise sector they have a really strong base, but one that doesn’t overlap with ours. The same industries, but not the same clients.”
A meeting of minds
Darren elucidates that it was following the first formal meeting with Go Inspire’s Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Headley and his team, where it became clear that there were very significant complimentary synergies that could help both organisations grow and prosper.
“You have to make these things work,” emphasises Darren, who adds: “So the cultural aspect of the teams was important and Go Inspire really aligns with our own culture. Over the years we have been quietly building our own print centres capability as a direct business, and this gave us an opportunity to review and evaluate our own position, which got stronger and stronger the deeper we went towards the acquisition.”
“We are thrilled to join the Xerox team and eager to contribute to the growth of Xerox Digital Services,” says Patrick, who adds: “Together with Xerox, we will expand the portfolio of high value services for our expanding client base throughout the UK and beyond.”
Data driven dynamism
Talking about the benefits the acquisition will bring, Darren explains that as a services business Xerox has three main lines of activity – managed print services, content and capture, and communication and engagement.
However, although Xerox has been in communication and engagement services for some time, he feels that this is an area that requires further development, which the acquisition of Go Inspire now makes possible: “It’s about managing outbound. We have capabilities to deliver print, and capabilities to develop an integrated digital experience, but we weren’t able to expand as fast as I would have liked. We weren’t able do it in the way that we needed to.”
Darren continues: “Arguably the most important thing in our business is actually getting to manage clients’ data, because in the marketing space, the one thing that clients really want is to say, ‘With the data I’ve got how can you help me make the best choices to profile the consumer, so that I can target them with the marketing campaign, and then help advise us which is the best route to drive that marketing campaign?’… ‘Also, can you co-ordinate all that so that we can connect to an inbound solution, so that we can get the clients that we want to reach, to communicate with us in a way that is very engaging?’ They have the inbound form; they just don’t know how to deal with the outbound form.”
Darren outlines that with acquisition of Go Inspire, Xerox can now join all of those dots and provide a really strong end-to-end solution, highlighting: “The data performance capabilities are everything.”
He emphasises: “If you look at the coders capabilities that Go Inspire have, the data scientists they have, and even the physical capabilities they have, versus what we have in our centres, and add on the collective digital capacity, then we have really a big opportunity in front of us.”
“This is important for clients,” continues Darren, who adds: “because they want to make their money work and they want their marketing campaigns to succeed, and having all those capabilities under one umbrella allows us to make those decisions on behalf of clients. Print and digital are better together. Using print to connect into the digital experience, the digital experience alongside the print experience, the right demographic, going back to your data, you will absolutely need to build a campaign that provides both a digital and a print experience and the connection of those two things is very powerful.”
“So, how do we get more connection between physical and digital world?” Darren questions, answering: “I now think we’ve got a role to play to help that happen and we’re in a really good position to go and do it.”
A bold ambition
From the point of view of individual customers, Xerox is now able to get direct feedback from its clients, live from the environment that it has been serving for printers – so the information and feedback available will help to drive the next generation of products the company will be able to offer. Looking to the future, how does Darren see the bigger picture playing out over the next three to four years?
He comments: “We have bought a business that works well. We have a very clear acquisition strategy: we buy good businesses, so we don’t want to take them apart, or run them ourselves, so the direction we’re going is fine,” before adding: “The power of Xerox and Go Inspire, and how we put them together for our clients, is where the magic’s going to happen. So, there will be some synergies because we can do things differently together, but things will also be very similar to how they are now. This is because Go Inspire will be running their business accountably for delivering their results, Xerox will be continuing their services, and we will be engaging clients jointly as one.
“That will allow both Xerox and Go Inspire to engage clients that they haven’t done before with new capabilities. Now both organisations have more capabilities and so it going to be making sure we put one and one together to make three, not two, build the capabilities, and leverage each other’s relationships to drive us forward.”
Darren concludes: “We will scale outside of the UK into EMEA; we’re already having conversations with suppliers in France and in Spain. Their ability to manage and navigate data is incredible and really powerful – and those sorts of services, of course, are scalable because they can be anywhere, and you don’t need to have the physical delivery mechanism. You’ll see Go Inspire being a bigger business outside of the UK in terms of space, but you’ll see them looking and acting very similarly to how they do today.”
