Create a brochure of which to be proud
Published on 06/05/2000 under Potpourri
I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say that brochure copy isn’t important because “nobody reads brochures.” Maybe the reason nobody reads them is that most of them are largely uninteresting and devoid of meaningful content.
Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies. And I think it’s getting worse because more top managers these days are choosing not to get involved in brochure production, or they limit their involvement to a cursory review at a very late stage. In my opinion, if we all worked a little harder at producing brochures that tell a product or service story more vividly, we’d probably find they really do help accelerate the selling process. I know your customers would appreciate the extra effort.
Here are a few suggestions to make your brochures more effective:
Think visually from the beginning. The clients I respect most—the ones who really know their subject matter—can’t resist drawing pictures. You see them spring to their feet shortly after a meeting starts and begin drawing pictures on a flip chart or white board. It’s really important for them to have you “see” the technology advantages the way they see it.
People like this have me instantly thinking of creative possibilities, and yet how many times in the life of a brochure production team do visuals seem like an afterthought? How often do we settle for certain pictures because there isn’t time to take new ones? Or budget money to create three-dimensional or diaphanous illustrations? An even bigger problem, I think, is when the content experts don’t give the brochure designers any suggestions for visuals, leaving them to come up with a layout on their own. The project is doomed to mediocrity because graphic designers have little or no idea what makes a product or service special. And they surely can’t compare it to alternative products or technologies, or visually demonstrate your technology’s advantages.
Find out what your customers need to know. This is a radical concept to be sure, but since customers are going to have the task of getting something meaningful out of your brochure, shouldn’t you at least think about the things they might want to know?
Put yourself in their shoes. Question every puffy headline, every dull photo or chart. Does it say anything relevant? And more importantly, does it help them understand why your product or service will better solve their problem?
I’ve found myself knee-deep in many brochure projects where we didn’t even understand what the customer need was, much less how to solve it. If you can, ask your content experts to start the orientation with an explanation of the basic problem the customer is trying to solve. Everything else will fall in place for you once you understand that.
Why should the customer pick you? Sales people joke about the “Trust me” proposition, but it isn’t funny in brochure production. You should include as many reasons why the customer should choose your product or service as you can pack into the available space: cost-benefit analysis. Detailed feature-benefit summaries. Tables comparing your product to competitive products. Test results. Case histories. Even testimonials. Pack it in, and make it difficult for puffery to find space.
And while we’re on the subject of puffery, allow me to pontificate briefly on one of my pet peeves: borrowed interest. What is it with all these arrows hitting the targets and pieces of the puzzle coming together and clocks showing we’re almost out of time ? And who said that globes and flags make you look more international? I guess the thinking is that if customers are too lazy to read our insipid copy, maybe they’ll remember our lame symbolism.
Is the design consistent with your overall positioning? I recently surprised a client by recommending a two-color approach for a brochure series when they had a long history of producing glamorous, four-color pieces. In this case, however, they were competing with small, regional companies that, if these companies had a brochure at all, it probably wasn’t full color. One of the main reasons my client’s market share in this business was shamefully low was that customers perceived them as being too expensive. Nothing like shooting yourself in the foot with expensive literature that confirms their basic perceptions.
On the other hand, I’ve also worked with extremely small companies that were trying to compete with very large ones. Their problem was just the opposite—they looked too small to be trusted with a big order. So you need to help these small companies look just as big as the Big Boys if they’re going to have any chance of cracking the Big Time.
In today’s high-tech, computer-assisted world, young brochure designers often confuse special effects with actual ideas. They feel the brochure is a failure if it doesn’t have some gee-whiz eye candy to perk up the lame copy. And clients are partly to blame, too, because they will look at a layout and say, “I dunno, it just doesn’t do anything for me.”
Maybe that’s because the brochure isn’t supposed to do anything for them. It’s supposed to help customers decide if your product or service is right for their situation. Anything in the brochure that doesn’t contribute to that objective should be deleted.
It’s time we stopped cranking out brochures in cookie-cutter fashion, paying more attention to how they look than what they say. Please understand—I’m not saying that looks aren’t important. But sloppy, cluttered layouts and cheap production values will communicate things about your company and its products that you never intended. If the content is there to assist customers in making their buying decisions, your brochure will deliver on its promise as a selling tool. And all the extra effort will pay generous dividends for you.