Keynote: Trends in Modern Communication
Ralf Schlözer, InfoTrends
Abstract
Man is a social animal and communication is the social adhesive that makes co-existence possible. As old as this awareness of the importance of communication is, the HOW of communication has changed drastically.
The presentation covers several fundamental changes: how consumers have been using media in recent years, what channels they prefer, how they exchange information and under what conditions media are used. These trends significantly influence how consumers access, handle and process documents. Decades-long established processes in customer and business-to-business communication are being put to the test. As digitalization creeps into daily life and newer generations come along, we are witnessing the genesis of an evolution.
In particular, printed communication has felt the impact. To avoid becoming irrelevant, print has to build a bridge to meet the new requirements media pose. Personalization, on-demand printing, linking to e-content, hybrid mail and e-post are greatly gaining in importance. It's time to step up to the challenge and lay the groundwork for the future
Ralf Schlözer
As Director of the On-Demand Printing and Publishing Service, Ralf Schlözer is responsible for all publications, studies and market surveys for digital production printing in Europe. The service's main areas of investigation are the use and market potential of digital production printing and influential factors such as technological advances, economic conditions, and the use of printed products.
Ralf Schlözer has over twenty years of experience in the graphics industry. Prior to his position at InfoTrends, he worked for manroland in research, product planning and product marketing for DI and toner systems. He is the author of numerous studies, journal articles and presentations. Schlözer has a graduate engineering degree in print technology and management from the University of the Arts in Berlin and an M.S. in graphics arts systems from the Rochester Institute of Technology (R.I.T.) in the USA.