Cross out the brochure

Ever found yourself with three – or 30 – boxes of brochures gathering dust?

A newsletter with brilliant open rates but no new enquiries?

A Facebook page everyone is busy feeding but nobody can explain why?

Maybe the solution is the problem.

The brochure that ate Christmas

It started in August with a “quick brochure”. By December it had grown from four pages to 24, there were 17 versions (nine called FINAL), and the budget was gone. (Read the backstory on LinkedIn.)

It was eye-catching, on brand and written with actual human input. Glossy as all get-out and applauded by all.

And it achieved so much zero that its corners curled in the racks.

Not because there’s anything wrong with brochures – brochures are fine.

But because at the Christmas party, someone finally asked, “What’s it actually for?”

Nobody could answer.

Where did it go wrong?

Right at the start, with a sentence like this: “We need a new brochure.”

Okay…?

“Sales are down. We need to generate more enquiries.”

Fair enough. Except we don’t know why sales are down.

Maybe potential customers don’t know the organisation exists. Maybe they can’t navigate the website. Maybe they’re emailing and nobody’s following up. Or perhaps you’re getting heaps of enquiries – just not from people who are ever going to buy anything.

Those are four different problems.

They probably have four different solutions.

A brochure might help with one of them – or several – or none.

We can’t know that yet.

Take the solution out of the sentence

There’s a trick I like.

When someone says, “We need a brochure,” mentally cross out the brochure.

What’s left?

We need...

More customers? Better relationships? Greater awareness? Fewer complaints? A bigger profit?

Once the “solution” is gone, we’re talking about the thing we actually want to change. In this case, “We need more sales.”

And now we can start looking at what’s in the way.

This is where things get interesting, because the barrier might be something nobody expected.

Your website might attract the right people, but your order form is clunky.

Your newsletter might have brilliant content, but your best customers aren’t opening it.

You might have plenty of enquiries, but your sales team takes a fortnight to respond.

Or your customers might understand your offering perfectly. They just don’t like it.

No brochure is going to fix that.

The expensive part isn’t the printing

Skip the underlying problem and you’re not developing a solution – you’re creating an expensive distraction.

You refine the wording. Update the design. Debate the photographs. Review the statistics. Report on the activity.

And maybe it all looks brilliant.

But there’s a difference between impressive and effective.

A newsletter can have all the right messaging.

A website can attract a ton of traffic.

A brochure can be a triumph of design.

None of those things necessarily solves the problem.

So the next time someone asks for a brochure, a campaign, a new website or another social media account, don’t start by asking how much it will cost or what it should look like.

Find out what made them ask for it. Then keep asking until you understand what actually needs to change.

You might still end up making the brochure.

You might make something entirely different.

Or you might discover that the answer has nothing to do with communications at all.

Which could save everybody time, money – and Christmas.