The good old phrase that gets bounded about daily in my life is ‘people buy from people’ and although it’s become a running joke in the CBF office – it’s so true. This comes back to your personality and the presentation of you and the receiving attitude of the recipient so how do you get that across with print items?
Have you taken a step back and looked at how your company branding is received? Are you a corporate that needs to keep very straight in its image or are you trying to portray young, dynamic almost fluid branding . Each are poles apart however it is possible to be corporate but be approachable, just take a look at the international brands Microsoft, IBM and Apple. Each have an huge international presence but keep their branding full of colours and smiles from all walks of life to give us all the impression that they are a nice business to deal with.
So taking a leaf out of their book, remembering that there are very few new ideas in the world on re-vamped and tweeted old ones. Take your corporate colours as starting point. In this country we know that red generally is there to highlight things i.e. danger and warnings but marketers have used this to their advantage (i feel) too much and it has debased the ‘Warning’ currency. Now we all like a warm feeling when it comes to colours but I bet you haven’t thought about what makes you click on a link – like this. Actually it’s not a link but by making it blue and underlining its presence immediately draws the eye. Don’t forget you have had years of ‘Chinese water torture’ teaching you that a blue underlined bit of text is something to click on with your mouse pointer. How does this help your print personality I hear you say well in the most basic form of marketing that one link has not only got your attention but encouraged you to interact with it and that is what I’m guessing is what you want from your branding because that is what we ALL want.
Transform that into print and the interactivity is lost but the attention grabbing follows the same pattern. We want all our customers to know that we know what are talking about but you must talk in their language for them to understand. Your print personality is then tailored directly at them it may even be personalised to them with their company information, or cross sell items to help enhance their work or personal lives. But whatever the purpose of the printed item, make sure your branding is clear throughout the document and try to speak directly to the reader to not only develop a ‘like minded’ thinking but a call to action to help them, help themselves; that way both personalities meet and move forward.
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