Information Screens Uses

This article discusses the growing use of modern flat TV screens such as LCD and plasmas and how they are used as information screens for messaging and providing customer information in places like transport hubs and outside the front of buildings and institutions. The article explains some cost effective methods of protection including the LCD enclosure:
Providing customers with information and keeping them informed is essential for many businesses. The transport industry have long adopted video displays even before the rise of flat screen TVs like LCD or plasma, when CRT monitors displayed timetabling information in train stations and bus depots.
Of course, now TVs have got thinner and cheaper, these information screens have been replaced by more modern TVs and it is not just the transport industry that are using them, either.
The great advantage of using a TV to display information is the speed at which messages can be relayed. For the transportation industry this has always been a boon as they can let customers know about delays and cancellations when and if they happen, but this type of immediacy is also useful for other institutions and businesses.
Many schools, colleges and universities are installing information screens in an effort to provide an efficient method to communicate with students. The difficulty in the modern college is that people can arrive throughout the day and while other communication systems are common, such as email, they are only effective when students check their email.
With information screens, important messages, including emergency information can be relayed as and when the news comes in, it also means the educational establishment can communicate successfully with all those people on campus, even if they are on different sites or at opposite needs of the building.
Information screens can be fitted both indoors and outdoors, but outdoor information screens are going to need protecting before they are installed.
A common method of using outdoor information screens is to source the make and size of LCD display you wish to use, from normal indoor screens, and then install them in an outdoor LCD enclosure.
Manufactured to accommodate any standard type of LCD TV device, LCD enclosures come in a variety of sizes-fitting the most common sized LCDs.
Once installed in the LCD enclosure, the screen will be protected from the weather, kept at the correct temperature (regardless of the ambient conditions), and be secured from theft, damage or vandalism.

Stop Whining About Price

Price cutting is a self-inflicted wound. Nobody holds a gun to your head and makes you cut your price. I know that many of you are thinking right now: "There is so much competition today that you can't maintain profits," "Everybody is giving everything away," "The salespeople can't negotiate," and "Everybody knows our pricing from the Internet..." Blah, Blah, Blah. Stop whining about price!

Only about ten percent of buyers buy on price alone. For that ten percent, you can decide to lower your prices or let your customers buy elsewhere. Every person who has ever sold anything knows that the happiest customers are the ones that pay you profit, whereas the unhappiest customers are the ones that you gave everything away to. Here's a news flash: You don't have to do business with them. It's your choice.

All things being equal, money will be the customer's final decision. It is your job to make everything unequal. Customers consider the 3 M's: Money, Machine, and Me. What are you doing to elevate the "me" part of the equation? The "me" part of the 3M's stands for you: your process, the dealership, the service, and the reputation. It's the easiest part of the equation to change. Your dealership is unique and your customers need to know why. You have to believe that you are the best and that you are worth more. Many salespeople and sales managers have a flawed, weak belief system. If you don't believe you are outstanding, you will make yourself a replaceable commodity.

Every day you must work as hard on yourself as you do on sales. When you get better, your customers will get better. Do you work on yourself every day in the area of attitude, education, motivation, sales skills, customer follow-up, and marketing? Let's be brutally honest and forget about being politically correct...most sales people stink at their profession.

The majority of salespeople never work on the above skills. Can you really tell me that those unmotivated and uneducated idiots are the tough competition? Your only competition is in your own mind.

Recently, while in Las Vegas, I shopped for shoes at Caesar's Palace. At the first store I went to, I noticed the salesperson looked agitated to have to hang up the phone to wait on me. He was extremely rude and did nothing to add value to his store or differentiate himself from other run-of-the-mill salespeople.

The second store I went to, I encountered a sensational salesperson that created rapport, sold value, and quality. He knew his product and made a high price seem like a bargain.

The first store lost two sales and the second gained from the first salesperson's stupidity.

Is the first salesperson and his inadequacies the norm, or was it an aberration? My experience says that unfortunately, he's the norm. My hunch is that your experiences are the same as mine.

Work every day to get better and show it to your customers. Work on your belief system. Don't be a commodity, and stop whining about price. Price is the easiest problem to solve in the sale.

T Shirts, Printing Methods Explained for Promotional T Shirts

I have had many of my customers ask me why we print their products using different methods at different times.

This is a valid question and for the sake of educating the larger masses and for those that are interested I will outline the difference between the printing process and how they may apply to your project. There are generally four printing methods, they are screen printing, heat transfer press, and embroidery "well this is not really printing but I place it there as you still need to place an image on a t shirt". The last and the latest technology is direct to garment. This process can produce some fantastic high resolution photographic printing but it is at a cost.

Screen printing

Screen printing is most likely the most popular method of printing promotional t shirts, the set up process is similar to offset traditional printing methods where you need to provide your images in to separable colour files, for example if you have a four colour file you need to supply a CMYK file which the print production firm can break each colour down and isolate them from each other creating, four separate print images, one for the cyan colour, one for magenta and one each for the yellow and K being black or grey scale.

Now that the CMYK files have been separated a separate screen is produced for each colour in total four screens a C screen, M screen, and one each for the Y and K screens. So each colour has its own separate screen. After the screens have been produced and have been quality tested and all adjustments have been made they are mounted on to the screen printing press were each colour is aligned to the next using registration marks on the screens. What this means is that each colour is printed separately on the promotional T shirt. Now that the screens have been set and have been tested we can begin the printing the t shirts.

In summarising screen printing we note that there is quite a bit of setup work to be done, you need to allow a hefty lead time for the turnaround of the promotional T shirts, also as the setup process is so intensive there is a substantial cost involved about $70 to $150 per colour so in a four colour print it would be between $280 and $600 depending on the print, and you have yet to print one good promotional T shirt.

The good news is that the set up is the costliest part of the screen printing process and from now on each t shirt is at a minimal price. To sum up, screen printing is the best process for producing large amounts of promotional T shirts, a minimum order of a few hundred and upwards.

Heat Press

Printing Promotional t shirts with heat transfers involves the digital reproduction of a heat transfer image on to specially coated paper that is then reversed printed and heat pressed on to the promotional t shirt.

The advantages of printing t shirts with heat transfer are that it is conducive to short runs. For example it is possible and cost effective to produce as little as one promotional t shirt. Therefore if you need only a few t shirts this is the method to be used, unfortunately this process comes with a huge restriction, you can only print on to white t shirts, now you may think that that's not real good but considering over 80% of promotional t shirts that are printed white the option is not that bad.

Embroidery

As I previously mentioned in the introduction of this article embroidery is really not a printing process but fundamentally you are placing an image on to a promotional t shirt, so I have decided to include it, if for nothing more than clarifying the process used to embroider promotional t shirts.

In a very simple explanation embroidery involves re scanning the image in to a stitch pattern or more so this creates a digital stitching map for the embroidery machine to follow. One of the limitations of embroidery is that it is only conducive to stitching smallish images like a logo on the breast pocket of the t shirt or a club emblem on the sleeve of a polo shirt.

Embroidery produces highly durable products, commonly used for corporate clothing it is not limited to t shirts or polo shirts.

Direct to Garment Printing

This is the latest in printing promotional t shirts, a fully digital process; it works similar to your home inkjet printer. The t shirt is placed on a movable platen and is guided through the print heads with extreme accuracy to produce some of the highest quality printed graphics to date. This printing method is capable of printing on to any coloured t shirt, as it uses white ink as the base colour on coloured promotional t shirts.

With digital direct to garment printing all you do is mount the t shirt on to the platen and press print on your computer just as you would when printing a word document. The direct to garment process is medium priced and is getting more cost effective as new technology are being released on to the market. It is possible to produce a single high quality t shirt to several hundred in a cost-effective manner

Summarising

The screen printing process is very intensive and costly to set up but when done it is the most cost-effective method for printing large volumes of promotional t shirts. The heat press method is only able to print on white t shirts, but you can print very small runs and is perfect if you only want a single t shirt.