A good brochure.

• Author: Prata, Kathleen
• Position: Guidelines in selecting good company brochures - Printing & Graphics

Anyone can spend $50 on letterhead and business cards and call themselves a corporation. But a brochur proves you are in business and shows you're more than a fly-by-night operation," writes advertising consultant Robert Bly in The Copywriter's Handbook.

But what defines a good brochure? Al Samuelson, executive vice president and director of creative services for Keller-Crescent, says a brochure mustr be well-focused.

"A very good brochure is an extension of a client's marketing plan," Samuelson says. "It's just another arrow in the quiver to reach one of their target audiences. And when you're dealing with a very specific audience, a brochure demands that you be highly focused."

So, wel before a brochure design is committed to paper, the market needs to be defined. Samuelson says you have to ask who is your target and what the specific appeals of your product or service are.

Those at Keller-Crescent, based in Evansville, believe that it's important for a company's image to ne conveyed throughout all forms of advertising--print, radio, and television.

Samuelson says viewers may not remember the actual product being advertised, but the company's personality will be etched into their minds.

Still others believe it's the visual impact that rabs the audience members' attention and stays with them.

"Our society sees the most impressive, best-produced visual images, and they see thousands of them a day. You can't send somebody a Xeroxed copy of anything anymore and have it represent your corporation," says Kathleen Desmond, marketing strategist for the Pitcock Design Group in South Bend. "The brochure you use ot present you product or service bespeaks the level of

professionalism of your organization."

Desmond says a good brochure must be well-designed and sophisticated. And, she adds, sophisticated does not mean complicated.

One sales piece her firm designed for a French company with a South Bend manufacturing facility was as simple as a chid's storybook. It described the company's hand-held tools, showing different head configurations that performed unique jobs, such as drilling and boring. The brochure brought home an international advertising/design award for Pitcock Design.

Many other factors go into a well-designed brochure as well. Color is a key component. Ron Konkel, production manager of Communico, a subsidiary of the Indianapolis-based Jackson Group, says if there were four equally well-designed brochures lying on a table--a black and white, and then two-...