Saturday, May 03, 2008

Is Your Brochure a Page-Turner or a Turn-Off?

What makes the perfect season brochure? A winning formula involves more than making it look pretty. If the brochure you’re involved with isn’t using the following techniques and quite a few others, then you’re losing sales.

Let’s begin at the end. If the brochure has been displayed back to front or thrown casually on a table, its back cover may be the first sight the customer has of a brochure, so a good one will have the venue’s name clearly displayed for people who know your business and will actually pick up a brochure for it.

When you put something on the back cover, it’s like shining a Super Trouper on it. Along with the inside covers and the centre spread, it’s one of the ‘hot spots’ that get noticed. A well planned brochure won’t waste these positions with boring information like How To Find Us or Terms & Conditions, because these are the best pages to sell the most valuable products.

Flipping the brochure over, the front cover will be shouting ‘PICK ME UP!’ It will use more tricks than Paris Hilton to grab attention, apart from forgetting to put knickers on. Look at magazine covers- you’ll nearly always see one big image (probably an attractive face (probably an attractive famous face)). An unusual picture can also make an impression. What they won’t have is a lot of tiny images, because trying to please everybody pleases nobody.

The brochure cover will use strong colours, especially red since that’s a colour more likely to appeal to women who form the majority of shoppers.

Notice how the most important reasons for picking it up are at the top. A designer sees the whole cover on a screen but we know that our piece of print may be stuck behind something on a tiered rack, so we need the venue name and the key products to be featured on the visible area.

Next time, we'll look at the inside pages.

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