Ruminations

 

One has to be very careful when designing a company’s marketing materials. It’s far too easy to settle for an unimaginative concept and then declare, “It’ll get the job done.”  Professionals with a strong business sense know better than that, though.  They understand that a half-baked concept is almost as bad as not having anything at all. 

One common approach it to take a picture of your office building and make that a key image in your company’s advertisements.  DON’T DO IT.  Customers don’t care what your building looks like, and your building probably doesn’t say anything meaningful about your products, your services, or the company’s reputation.  One possible exception: If your company is huge and employs hundreds of people, then this might be worth emphasizing in your company’s ad campaigns.  In such situations, it might be helpful to have a photo that emphasizes the size of your office building, with your hundres of employees gathered around it. Needless to say, this won’t work for a lot of companies.

Yet another common approach is to use a photograph of your employees.  Again, avoid this.  Unless the photograph communicates something meaningful about your company – or unless you have some exceptionally photogenic employees – this comes across as cheesy and unimaginative. Most readers would look at that and think, “Why should I care what you people look like?”

(Of course, if your company is a modeling agency, then that’s a whole ‘nuther matter.  By all means, show some photos of the models that you work with!)

What’s even worse?  Having no images at all.  Few companies would take this approach in a magazine advertisement, but they might do this with trade show flyers or other handouts.  Again, don’t do it.  An advertisement doesn’t do much good if people don’t read it, and they’re unlikely to read something that contains paragraph upon paragraph of text with no images whatsoever.  It’s a horrible idea.

So whatever you do, don’t take the easy way out. Sure, you’ll save yourself a lot of effort, but whatever effort you do put in will be wasted.  Is that really a worthwhile trade?

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