THE BROCHURE IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE BROCHURE!
I was just reading the Firebelly Digital blog, where Firebelly CEO Duncan Alney colorfully expressed his disagreement with Mediasauce, another Indianapolis-based ad agency that, with much fanfare, recently pronounced the print brochure dead. So momentous was the alleged death that Mediasauce held a ceremony to commemorate it, and invited the public to join them.
At the event (which I didn’t attend), Mediasauce presumably told everyone that paper was fast growing obsolete, what with all of this modern computer technology at our fingertips. Rather than postpone the inevitable, why not get a leg up on slow-adapting competition and ditch brochures now, before it’s the cool thing to do?
The problem with this message, as Duncan astutely notes, is that the brochure is NOT dead — at least not yet. Perhaps “The Brochure Is Gasping For Life In The Face Of Certain Annihilation At The Hands Of The Greener, Cheaper (And, Let’s Face It, Sexier) Internet” just didn’t have the right ring to it. I digress.
That the brochure (and I assume by “brochure” they mean all print sales collateral like folders, one-sheets, etc.) is even dying is very much a debatable assertion. Oh, the skinny fellow has certainly ceded his position as the undisputed heavyweight champ of sales communications, but we’ve all known that for years. If the folks at Mediasauce really wanted to sound bold and audacious, they should’ve made this grand pronouncement 10 years ago.
Anyway, as Duncan said in his blog, the arrival of every new medium results in a maelstrom of claims it will spell doom for another, older medium. And yet, those old mediums stubbornly persist. There are some exceptions, most notably the 8-track tape. And it would be disingenuous to pretend vinyl records are of interest to anyone other than audiophiles and collectors.
But the brochure, well, it’s different. For instance, let’s say you’re a salesmen. Let’s say you sell caskets. And you’ve got this new, out-of-this-world line of Mahogany hardwood body boxes that you just know beat the hell out of every other Mahogany line on the market.
So you hit the road. You drive from mortuary to mortuary, talking up this killer set of Mahoganies, and how they’re made of the best virgin timber and are replete with beautiful marble inlays and have these shiny, reinforced steel handles. And as you finish each pitch and shake hands with each mortuary director, you hand off a business card (because those certainly ain’t dead yet) and off you go — without leaving so much as wallet-size photo of one of those beautiful corpse crates you’re trying to sell.
I know what you’re thinking. “Why not bring your laptop and show them pictures, and then send them to your web site,” or maybe, “Why couldn’t you give each target a CD-ROM or even a flash drive that contains a digital sales presentation?”
You could do those things. But then you’d be asking the mortuary director to take several extra steps to engage with your product. On the other hand, a good old brochure will sit there on his desk, beckoning him, tempting him, saying over and over again, “Please, please Mr. Mortuary Man come and flip through several pages of beautiful cadaver cartons!” A CD-ROM or a flash drive, or even a web site, will not do that.
And maybe you think you don’t need to do that. But you do. Especially if you sell something that really exists, and not just invisible, spurious ideas.
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