Brochure Design – 2 must follow principles

Brochures and other print media ads are sometimes confused as serving the same purpose but there is one big difference. This difference lies in the fact that newspaper or magazine advertisement are used to make reader aware of any product or service in the most flattering way. While brochures assume that reader already know about the product or service and the purpose is to make reader delve deeper. Thus brochures take the baton from ads to achieve the desired result.

The best brochures help in taking the final decision. Let’s see what principles successful creative graphic design firms follow while designing a winning brochure.

Knowing the client and the target market

Understand what client needs and wants and don’t forget to understand his/her business so that the information conveyed is relevant ant up-to-date and the design reflects the perspective of target audience.

Knowing the Brochure’s Function
Find out from the client the function of the brochure as it can have a major say in the designing it. Following are some of the functions a brochure can play.

• Leave-Behinds – To be given to the potential customer after the meeting.
• Point-of-sale – The kind you may pick up while in the line for movie tickets or at banks.
• Respond to Inquiries – To be sent to someone asking about a specific product.
• Direct Mail – To accompany sales letter to buttress the claims made in the letter.

These are just two from the long list of must-follow principles of brochure design as followed by some of the more successful creative graphic design firms offering professional creative design solutions. I will cover the rest of them in some other post.

Web Advertising Agencies – Change in the Interactive Marketing

Web 2.0 has affected a sea change in the interactive marketing space because now information flow has become multi-directional – from machine to human, peer to peer, and even machine to peer and vice versa. This is miles ahead of the one way flow prevalent during early days of Internet. Web 2.0 phenomenons such as blogs, RSS, social media, etc., have made Internet a medium for creating, distributing, using and sharing content.

This avatar of web is mixing and mashing earlier stand alone silos of website content, advertising, email, search engine optimization and corporate and product blogging into one vast interactive space where lectures are becoming a conversation. And it is important for a smart and up with the times web advertising agency to play just the right music to keep the audience interested.

This right music is concerned with gaining and maintaining a favorable attitude of the target customers towards the Websites. In interactive space, it is a website’s interactivity which determines the revisits and conversions of the visitors.

It is interactivity which sets apart traditional and Internet advertising. And any aspiring interactive advertising agency must take note that it is because of interactivity that consumers and advertisers are capable of real-time, two-way and fast interactions resulting in increased traffic and conversions.

But in these times of consumer centric marketing, don’t consumers have a say in deciding a website’s interactivity?

In fact they have the biggest say!

It was found that it is not the website’s degree of interactivity per se, but perceived interactivity on part of visitors, which determines the overall attitude toward Website and a positive or negative decision.

It is perceived interactivity which determines the level of various interactions – between consumers and advertisers, the influence of messages on consumers, and sharing among consumers themselves.

Let’s discuss this perceived interactivity and its effect on attitude of consumers towards a particular website for the benefit of myriad web advertising agencies.

Perceived Interactivity

Interactivity on the web can be of three types:

(1) Interaction between users and messages/machine – this is interaction between human and non-human entity. This type of interaction is mostly behavioral or psychological on part of humans.

(2) Interaction between senders and receivers – here senders and receivers interact through computers.

(3) Interaction between machine and machine in the semantic web space of future

While these are the types of interaction a web master would strive to promote, he/she should not lose sight of perceived interactivity which would determine the visitor’s perception of control on their actions in the computer-mediated environment and the perception of their capability of navigating through cyberspace.

This perceived interactivity has two constructs:

Ease of navigability – the ease with which a visitor roam around the virtual cognitive space and glean knowledge out of the data making up that space.

Responsiveness – how responsive is the web space toward the visitor’s actions? This space may comprise a machine, messages, and an imagined receiver.

Factors Influencing Perceived Interactivity

Since perceived interactivity is the combination of internal factors such as perceived control over where the Internet user is and where he/she is going, and external factors such as his or her sense of how responsive the Web as a system is to his or her actions; following affect the perceived interactivity:

Speed of Interaction: Faster the perceived speed of action in web environment, higher would be the perception of interactivity.

Range: Higher the number of options in making changes in the web environment, higher would be the perception of interactivity.

Mapping: This concerns the user controlling where he/she is going. Higher the sense of navigation, better the perceived interactivity.

Since perceived interactivity is positively related to consumers’ attitude towards a web site; designing, web advertising and marketing should be tackled with responsiveness and navigability in mind and by factoring in consumers’ needs and requirements, perceived interactivity can be manipulated to web advertising agencies advantage.

Advantages of A Good TV Commercial

Television viewing is a favorite pastime as well as a means of relaxation for most people. Reasons are not hard to fathom. Television harnesses the two most important sensory organs – eyes and ears – by combining sight, color, sound and motion to capture the imagination of the viewer.

With TV being such a dominant medium to catch eyeballs, it is not surprising that TV advertising corners the biggest part of marketing outlay of a company. Let’s discuss some of the advantages of advertising through television commercials.

1. A well-made ad can reach millions in one go and if it has got recall value because of great content, the advertised product makes the required impact.

2. Since TV has so many options for each demographic group, you can focus on your target audience by picking and choosing the right slots for your commercials. For instance, if you are targeting kids, you can advertise during popular cartoon shows, whereas if housewives are your target audience, you will choose soap operas.

3. With TV, you have a better scope of catching the attention and imagination of your target audience. You got music, you got visuals, you can tell a story, you can combine all the aforesaid elements and you can take the viewers on a delightful ride which will have them coming back for more. As a result, a cleverly crafted TV commercial with superior production values can propel the advertised product to never before sales figures.

But TV commercial production and broadcast is a costly affair. That is why experienced advertising agencies with full fledged television commercial production facilities are the best organizations for creating a TV commercial that will be an effective promotion vehicle for your products or services.

Successful Branding – Respect The Customers

If you as an advertiser, whether you as an interactive advertising agency or a specialist corporate branding firm, have portrayed your customer in poor light to contrast it with the product utility, you sure as hell have diminished the brand’s ability to comfort the self-esteem of those who use it.

This ‘highlight by contrast’ strategy would boomerang as you might have made a pretty entertaining ad which might achieve higher recall scores, but you have also established your brand as a snob.

Brand users define themselves through the brands they use, why is it that so many brands insist on portraying their customers as bumbling idiots, rude individuals or societal misfits? If your product is not real niche one in the category of Rolls Royce (then you don’t need to tom-tom your brand, do you?) people with their individual frailties would never identify with your brand.

A brand becomes successful when it consistently reflects the same set of values over long time and when, as a result, the consumer begins to associate those values with the brand and its owner.

When this happens the brand creates a feeling of comfort and trust as customer knows those values and is secure in the knowledge that the brand owner is willing to stick by them.

But, as with any relationship, it is a two way street so far as mutual respect and trust is concerned. The consumers who are willing to trust your brand will trust it even more if the brand, in turn, shows them that it trusts and respects them. Tell them how great you think they are and never say or do anything that belittles them.

Show your customer that not only should they like your brand because it is trustworthy but because it lets them know that your brand likes them too and thinks of them as the fairest of them all.

Branding Corporate Identity

The following five points are keys to successfully build and manage your corporate identity:

Project the personality of the corporation: This projection should be authentic and believable, and it should reflect in the daily conduct. Take the case of Star bucks – they claim to be environmentally conscious and their corporate practices actually are.

1. It should be spontaneous: If McDonald’s project themselves as a fun place to have a snack, their mascot actually looks like he is having pots of fun. This example buttresses the need for messages, logos, mascots, even products or services taking cue from the established corporate identity.
2. Go back to the drawing board: Don’t imitate. You as a company are unique. Go to the drawing board, unlearn all the things that are already out there, find your uniqueness and go all out to communicate that uniqueness.
3. Don’t waiver: Once you have determined the values and the principles you want your company to adhere to, stick to them whatever the lure or situation is. Don’t get attached with products or services which do not gel with your identity.
4. Be there, always: Whatever you do should communicate your corporate identity. If Apple say they are next generation, everything they do – products and services offered, people working with them, their stores, even their press releases are next generation, if not better.Finally, find one or a handful of words which besides being descriptive and meaningful should convey your identity.

Take the case of Hewlett Packard which has built its corporate ID around the word “invent” or Jaguar which has its corporate identity around the word “gorgeous” – a true reflection of its cars.