A good customer recently sent me a quote request for a large volume program.  Due to the size of the program, pressure from the “end user”, and because it was “commodity printing”. I was told that the job was going out for bid and that I needed to be very competitive.  Being put in a bid situation is atypical of this customer but I completely understand their prerogative, so long as we are comparing apples-to-apples of course.  Trouble is, comparing printing, especially so-called “commodity printing”, can be quite difficult unless a side-by-side comparison is made (think HD televisions, on their own they look fine but side-by-side you can see a vast difference in image quality between brands/models).  In a bid scenario I will almost always offer to sample at no charge so that my customer has the opportunity to compare a competitor’s print to ours should the competitor be willing to do the same (this offer in and of itself puts pressure on the competitor).  In this case, due to time restrictions in the bidding process, we did not have this opportunity to sample and my customer was going to have to choose based on pricing, relationship history, gut feeling, etc.  I decided to put together a very simple side-by-side comparison to illustrate the difference between us and the competition…