The competition to attract point-of-sale attention is intense — whether it is a packaged product in a store, a book on a display shelf, a magazine on a news stand, or a direct mail catalogue in the letterbox — the challenge is the same: how to activate in the mind of the viewer differentiation and positioning. Print is the only medium that offers an infinite combination of colours, surface treatments, shapes, substrates and smells to address all of the human senses to emphasise the value of a product.

The role of Value Added Printing is to increase differentiation by combining several special elements. The design’s message and graphic elements can be enhanced through the selection of a corresponding substrate quality, and then extended with an almost endless combination of inks, special effects or metallic pigments, foiling, holograms, coatings, finishing and personalisation.

The PrintCity Alliance has been a leader in Value Added Printing since 2003. Ongoing projects include Value Added UV sheetfed printing, Brand Protection, Value Added Printing of Newspapers, Food Packaging, as well as recent fields of research, including Organic Electronics and RFID. To further extend understanding in this field, PrintCity and the German media marketing organisation Fachverband Medienproduktioner e.V. (f:mp.) are cooperating in PRINTplusX. The project’s objectives includes investigating some of the “Secrets of Value Added” on how to successfully create added value, to quantify what added attention/response can be generated, and at what additional production costs.

With this Internet portal we would like to invite you to explore ‘THE SECRETS OF VALUE ADDED’ because there is much more behind this term than ‘only’ the wide field of print finishing.

Several PRINTplusX virtual products have been developed to show the optical, haptic and emotional differences between conventional and value added print products.

	Helmut Dangelmaier		Rüdiger Maaß
	President PrintCity		Managing Director f:mp.