Moving Messages

As we emerge post-COVID, this is a good time for print businesses to take stock of their product and service offerings and look for new market opportunities. In a previous issue, Pete Basiliere enumerated the opportunities in direct-to-shape printing (“Beyond the Hype,” WhatTheyThink, August 2020, page 46). This month, let’s take a look at vehicle graphics.

A lot of shops have been doing vehicle graphics for many years, and it’s certainly a more mainstream application than direct-to-shape or some other new areas like printed electronics. And as with virtually everything else in existence, the COVID pandemic has the potential to alter the market. 

We’ve written often about new developments in vehicle graphics, but if they’re not something you’ve paid a lot of attention to, they’ve come a long way from those stick-on letters or magnetic signs you slapped on the side of a pick-up truck—or even those 1970s custom-painted van murals. 

Consumer vs. Commercial 

First, let’s back the car up a second. There are two basic markets for vehicle graphics—consumer and commercial. As the word suggests, “consumer” graphics are purchased by individual car owners for their private vehicles, while “commercial” vehicle graphics are applied to company vehicles.

On the  consumer side, you occasionally see some striking vehicle graphics cruising the streets, but the biggest application for consumer vehicle graphics is simple color changes. Once upon a time, if you wanted to change the color of your car, or if the auto dealership didn’t have the color you wanted, it would have to be repainted. Today, car color changes are done with wraps, which has the added benefit of making further color changes relatively easy and inexpensive, should a car owner tire of their car’s hue. Car owners also often request other decorative effects such as smoked taillights, tinted headlights and blacking out chrome. There are also transparent plastic films such as Clear Bra that are applied to protect a car’s paint job from road debris and other damage.

True consumer vehicle graphics tend to be more the purview of wealthier car owners, who want to spiff up their Lamborghinis or Ferraris (it’s also a very California thing), but for most vehicle wrap pros, the real action is in commercial wraps, especially fleets. Commercial vehicle graphics also can mean a lot of repeat business, as branding changes regularly requiring an entire fleet to be redone. Vehicle graphics shops that have big corporate fleet clients find this a big profit center.

Fleet Feat

Commercial vehicle graphics can take a bewildering variety of forms, and, yes, those old adhesive letters and magnetic panels still exist. Homemade vehicle graphics can be produced on a simple and inexpensive Cricut printer and applied to a window. For a small local business, that may be perfectly sufficient. 

Simple vehicle graphics output from an inexpensive Cricut printer.

If you have a higher-end printer/cutter from the likes of Roland, Mimaki, Mutoh and/or others, you can take this basic idea to the next level, and even combine window lettering with full body wraps.

Vehicle graphics can be an important part of a company’s branding—and even serve as an advertising vehicle (so to speak).

For businesses, it turns out that vehicle graphics have been found to be a highly effective advertising medium. Bellevue, Wash.’s Riveting Wraps (www.rivetingwraps.com) cites data from the Out of Home Advertising Association (OAAA) and 3M that finds that “Vehicle wraps have the lowest cost per thousand impressions and highest impressions per dollar compared to other advertising channels.”

And a study conducted by the American Trucking Associations (ATA) found that “a vehicle wrap on a typical trailer makes 10 million impressions every year. That number increases to 14 million for trailers with reflective graphics and to 16 million for local delivery vans.”

Trailers and professional services trucks are ideal locations for vehicle graphics. Think of it this way: you just moved into a new neighborhood, you need yard work, lawn care or tree servicing, and you see a relevant vehicle parked outside a neighbor’s house. You snap a picture of the contact info on the graphic and look them up online or contact them later. Repeat for any other relevant business whose vehicles you come across. 

Trailers are an obvious place to put vehicle or fleet graphics.

Design for Driving

As a provider of vehicle graphics printing and installation, being heavily involved in design can also be a valuable service for a customer, especially if you can help avoid some common vehicle graphics pitfalls and adopt best practices. 

• Avoid busy or cluttered designs. Unless the wrapped vehicle is parked, it is going to be seen in motion, either tooling down the highway at 70+ mph or in city traffic where the average driver has other things they should be paying attention to. Wrap design should be clean and clear and answer three basic questions about the advertised business: Who are they? What do they do? How do you contact them? It should answer these questions in less than 10 seconds.
• Add lines like “We deliver!” if indeed the customer’s business does. 
• Add URLs or, even better, QR codes, and ideally both for people who don’t know what QR codes are. True, drivers shouldn’t be scanning QR codes while driving, but if you’re stopped at a light or in a car park, it’s a great way to get a customer to check out the vehicle owner’s website. 
• Keep branding—color, logo, overall look and feel—consistent with other marketing and advertising materials. Big brands will demand this, smaller businesses may be less attuned to it, but it can pay to be proactive in helping companies with their own brand management. 
• If appropriate, go for “kid appeal.” One wrapper I interviewed some years ago told me that if a vehicle graphic can catch the eye of a child, they are likely to point it out to their parents or whatever adult is driving. 

Not the End of the Road

It’s true that with fewer people commuting, there is less traffic during the traditional drive times, so vehicle graphics have less visibility during what once were peak hours. But people still do venture out and may be looking for different kinds of services, especially those that deliver. This is a good time to either investigate adding vehicle graphics to your arsenal of capabilities—or convincing customers of the effectiveness of a high-quality, well-designed wrap.