Sales Literature and Sell Sheets
Continuity:
Creating an Image
Greater than the parts.
Jim Schakenbach
Managing Partner, SCT Group Inc.
www.sctgrp.com
Let’s face it. Every industry loves its own proprietary language
and the world of marketing communications is no different. Today, marketing
and advertising is all about branding, but in its early days it was known
as positioning and a key element in the effort to establish a marketing
identity – regardless of what you call it – is something called
continuity. What exactly is that? It’s the strategy and process of
coordinating all the elements of a marketing message to achieve a consistent,
memorable, overall look and feel for a company, service, or product.
Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? It’s really all about making
sure that everything you do as a company has a coordinated look and feel
about it. Graphically, that means creating a standard logo, selecting
a corporate color (or colors), a particular typeface, even a photo or
illustration style. Content-wise, it means determining key points for
your marketing messages that clearly, concisely, and compellingly elucidate
your unique selling proposition (there’s another one of those industry
terms that falls in and out of fashion on a regular basis).
This is not as simple as it sounds. It requires an unfaltering, dedicated
effort up and down your marketing chain to avoid going “off message”.
Time and time again I have seen engineering departments grab logos and
typestyles and use them with haphazard abandon on everything from data
sheets to PowerPoint presentations. I’ve seen sales people ignore
mandates from the home office and routinely put out their own marketing
pieces with not a shred of semblance to the carefully crafted look painstakingly
created by their own marketing department. The result is always the same
– a dilution of the company’s identity and often a related drop
in market share in response to the lack of an effective, unified marketing
message. That, in turn, requires a needless squandering of precious marketing
resources to reestablish the company’s former brand awareness in
the marketplace.
It doesn’t have to be that way. A little discipline and a lot of
vigilance can head off these potential image drainers and nip them in
the bud before they become a real problem. By paying attention to continuity,
your company can reap a multitude of benefits – heightened market
visibility, enviable awareness among potential customers, and a more effective
use of your marketing budget, yielding the biggest bang for your buck.
Overall, a keen eye toward continuity helps you achieve levels of image
and branding efficiency unavailable to practitioners of hit-or-miss marketing
with little or no image consistency between messages and media. It starts
with your corporate identity.
I never cease to be amazed at how casually some companies treat their
identity. There’s no shortage of firms that use two, three, even
four versions of their logo on a regular basis, with no particular rhyme
or reason. The same goes for corporate colors – often a victim of
one or more employee’s personal taste (“I HATE that color, I’m
going to use green instead...I think it looks better…”). This
dilution of image is made even easier by the proliferation of PowerPoint
and other tools used by more and more employees. If this is happening
to your company, I have three words of advice: STOP IT. NOW. The longer
this practice is allowed to continue, the more it will cost your company.
In time, money, image awareness and, ultimately, in market share.
How do you combat this insidious problem? By establishing company-wide
standards and maintaining them. Issue a simple style sheet that everyone
can understand and follow and then enforce it. That means establishing
a corporate color (or colors), a particular typestyle (especially one
that is duplicated in computer fonts) and creating a logo that works well
in 4-color (the process colors used by printers to print in full color),
2-color (usually black and a particular shade of a color from the Pantone
Matching System, identified by a PMS number), and black and white printing.
If you create high and low resolution files in these three versions and
make them available to the people most likely to need them, you will go
a long way toward unifying your image out in the marketplace.
And follows through in your message.
Now that you’ve got your company look under control, it’s time
to work on your message. This often starts with a mission – or for
the more esoteric entrepreneur, a vision – statement. Sure, many
of these typically contain a lot of over-heated rhetoric designed to make
the board of directors warm and fuzzy, but they CAN be valuable. While
others may be long on hyperbolic language and short on real meaning, work
to make yours meaningful, concise, actionable, and unique. Be ruthless.
Is this who we really are? Is this what we really want to be? Does this
really set us apart? Once you’ve honed your statement to accurately
reflect what your company is and what it stands for, it will enable you
to create a meaningful slogan or tagline to be used in your marketing
messages. Avoid the trite and contrived. “The Leader in (blank)”
has been done before. Trust me.
A good tagline will inform every message that follows. It will help flavor
copy written for your sales literature, web site, advertising, even internal
messaging. It will make generating consistent, focused text easier because
it will help set the tone and form the basis of the message. And that
message, aided by the consistent visual combination of logo, color, and
typestyle – wielded with ruthless discipline -- all combine to create
a powerful, memorable marketing impression.
That, my friends, is the power of continuity. Ralph Waldo Emerson once
wrote “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” He was
wrong. Consistency, otherwise known as continuity, is the most potent
weapon of great marketing minds.
©2007 SCT Group, Inc.
sctgrp.com
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