Written by Andy Neat

Happy new year everyone. I hope you all had a nice Christmas, for me it was my first one with an excited toddler who happens to be obsessed with Paddington Bear…so it was marmalade sandwiches all round!

 Welcome to 2018 and welcome to my first blog installment of the year. This year is a big one for me and for the business unit I manage because I’ve got my first campaign to head up.

This is now my 5th year managing Marking & Installation and without checking the facts, I think it’s fair to say it’s been one the best product ranges for sheer evolution and development of products and technologies in a short space of time. To quote one of my colleagues “it’s like a bear waking up from hibernation”….perhaps Paddington bear, maybe not! What I mean here is, at one time we only had two marking systems for marking such things as terminals in our Portfolio, the Bluemark X1 and the good old Plotter. Fast forward to today and we have at least nine. Although originally both these devices were and still are fantastic for printing large batches of markers, but we had to evolve to bridge a gap between customers with a low to medium marking output and a large marking output, cue the Thermomark Line range in 2012 which exploded our marking customer base wide open. This is where I come in at 2013, with the influx of potential business it needed managing.

Where we are now, we still have the original Bluemark (but now CLED model) and the Plotter, but we now also have the lower consumption printers in Thermomark Card and Roll and even mobile options as of 2016 with Thermomark Prime and Themofox. These two printers were our biggest sellers in 2017, perhaps showing an evolving market, who knows?

Last year we released 2 new roll based printer, the Thermomark Rollmaster 300 & 600. These were designed to cope with large amounts of our old faithful shrink sleeve labels among all our other roll based materials of course. And let’s not forget the Topmark Laser from 2014, this 90kg beast will (you guessed it) laser etch onto stainless steel, aluminum, polyamide plastic and more.

I’m aware I’m waffling here, but my point is we’ve evolved, we moved with customer demand and technology and perhaps most importantly we’ve digitalized industrial marking with the likes of printing from apps and WiFi printing. As a result of this direction we now proudly sit in a position where we have the largest Industrial marking offering in the world.

So what’s in store for 2018? Well my campaign, #MarkingTheNation is the main headline for me. With this; expect to see competitions, promotional offers, lots of Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram activity plus lots more to be revealed. We also have our largest EVER stand at Drives & Controls in April and we’ll be holding seminars and training’s around the country.

Additionally, we have, wait for it, two new marking systems being released this year, one of which is going to be the best in world. They say you should always leave a crowd wanting more so I’ll leave it there.

Thanks for reading, watch out for us this year while we are #MarkingTheNation and look forward to sharing the campaign with the UK soon. Now excuse me while stock up my marmalade supplies.

For more information on anything for MArking and Installation, contact Andy Neat on any of the below:

Twitter: @pxc_andyneat

LinkedIn: Andy Neat

E-mail: aneat@phoenixcontact.com

Tel: +44(0)1952 681700