What impact is Covid-19 having on consumer behavior related to office paper? Is the massive increase of people working from home instead of an office, affecting the attitude towards printing? Where do they buy their paper and what’s the status the Multicopy brand? We wanted to find out and performed a market study.
Using Pollfish, a digital survey was carried out in five countries during October 2020: the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. 3400 participants in total, all currently working either partly or 100 % from home. The age span was 18–54 years.
The survey focused on four main areas:
• workplace distribution
• working location
• buying habits
• printing and working habits
The UK showed the highest distribution of people working 100% from home during the pandemic, followed by the Netherlands and Sweden. In the other end of the spectrum, more than half of the of the French respondents replied that they still work mainly from the office.
When asked about their wishes on working location in the future, a majority would prefer a mix of home and office. Only 15% answered that they wish to spend all of their work hours at the office, however, 83% expect to return to an office environment within six months, and most say three days per week would be preferrable.
The survey results show that the main benefits of working from home are considered to be no travelling/commuting (32%), and the flexible working hours (30%). Quite a few even plans to move further from the office – as a result of those benefits.
Not having access to a printer shows to be one of the major downsides of working from home, however, missing colleagues and the difficulty to separate work from private life are considered to be most negative.
A majority of the respondents are planning to stay in their current home, without making changes. But 34% replied “I will stay in my current home but make improvements to make space for home working”. Buying a printer, a screen or an IT-device or dedicating a space for work. When it comes to creating a home office, there is inspiration to be found in this article, posted in September.
Less printing occurs from home, but the respondents aged 18–24 years are actually printing more than the older ones. That brings some hope to the copy paper industry! The type of documents that are printed the most are invoices (40%) for reading and editing, and reports? contracts (34%) for signing.
The survey shows that Multicopy has the highest product brand name percentage. Since the ranking for buying a copy paper puts print quality “runner up”, Multicopy may very well benefit from its “no-compromise-needed qualities”. However, sustainability has the most polarized ranking – either getting top or bottom score. UK respondents found sustainability the least important, the Germans gave the highest ranking.
It’s safe to say that home working is here to stay, even after the pandemic has passed. The big increase of people working from home has changed the routines in many ways – printing less, buying copy paper online etc. We’re confident that a strong brand will be increasingly important in the future landscape. That the sustainability and premium quality that make Multicopy the only office paper you need, will meet the needs of individuals, just as well as enterprises. We just need to make sure that the message gets through to everyone – at home as well as at the office. Challenge accepted!
A survey commissioned by Stora Enso polled 3,400 workplace consumers across Sweden, UK, France, Netherlands, and Germany on office paper purchasing and printing behaviour and delivered a number of new insights including one big surprise for paper makers.
All of us at Multicopy would like to thank all of you for reading our articles and keeping in touch with us in one way or another throughout the year. With this video, we want to send you a happy holiday greeting - and a little reminder that no wish is too big. A big thought can lead to many small steps forward.
Humans’ urge to communicate has always been strong – and with the evolution of paper, the written form of communicating opened a whole new world of efficiency, suddenly dismantling geographical boundaries. Naturally, the history of papermaking is closely connected to societal, industrial, and cultural events.