Steal from yourself to build your brand

Great photo by Polina Tankilevitch

​Let’s dive right into this. It’s based on a disheartening episode we recently experienced with a client. 
 
Here’s the story: We’d been working, for months, with this client, to develop their new brand persona, by taking a meticulous customer-back approach to their business. 
 
And by “customer-back,” we mean, “starting with the customer—who they are, what they need—and then working back into all of the messaging and, indeed, offerings.” 
 
Done right, this is a powerful process. With this client, we did it right. We were developing some killer insights that would position our client head-and-shoulders above all their competitors. 
 
This positioning, then, informed the structure and content of the new website we were creating for them. 
 
(“Disheartening”? Stay with us.) 
 
So. We did the deep-dive customer-discovery work with them. We developed the new brand persona. We developed the strategy, and then the wireframe (“outline”) for the website. All of these were approved by the client. 
 
Then, using the approved wireframe, we wrote all the pages of the website for them. These, too, were heartily approved by the client. 
 
Everything was going swimmingly. 
 
Cart? Horse? Huh?
 
Then, one day, the client surprised us by sending us a brochure to review. 
 
This was certainly a surprise: “brochure” hadn’t been discussed before. But that’s fine. We’re not parochial. We can go with the flow. If clients want to take the initiative and bolster their marketing, we’re all for it. 
 
Until we saw this brochure. 
 
Mind you, it was finished. Outlined, written, and laid out. The client told us they wanted to send it out, en masse, and wanted our quick review/sign-off before it went. 
 
Holy @#$#@$. 
 
Our first reaction was Who is this brochure for?? Yep, it was that far off of everything that had been previously, and laboriously, developed... and then approved.
 
Yikes. 
 
There was not a sentence, not an image, not a pixel in this thing that was on-brand or on-message. It told a different, and confusing story. The imagery would have been off-putting to the specific target audiences we had worked so hard to define. The structure was confusing. The layout was amateurish: like a mediocre student project. There was no call-to-action.  It was, in short, a train wreck. 
 
Tough love
 
Now, we’ve seen lots of mediocre, and downright bad, marketing materials in our time. So along that continuum, this one was hardly a shocker or a standout. 
 
But what did make it so extraordinary was the way in which it simply disregarded all of the painstaking, groundbreaking work that had preceded it. Not only would it turn off the very people it was supposed to turn on, it—most importantly—squandered all of the effort that went into the main branding and site-building. 
 
We don’t enjoy giving tough love here at Copel Communications, but we also don’t shy away from it when it’s required. Here, it was required. It was not fun to tell this client that, while we appreciated all of the effort that clearly went into this thing, it would do more harm than good, and should simply be shelved. 
 
Ouch. 
 
So now you know the “disheartening” part of this article. But what about the “Steal from yourself” headline? 
 
Play it on the cheap
 
You probably figured it out for yourself already. Between the prior branding, and especially the website and its already-written pages, this client already had everything they needed to quickly create a killer brochure, practically for free.
 
It was the same messaging. In just a slightly different format. Indeed, it’s even easier: You don’t know how a visitor is going to poke around the different pages of your website. But they’ll start reading that brochure from the front cover, and turn through it, page-by-page, in order, until they reach the end. So it’s very straightforward to populate the thing, especially when you have all of the content and images already on hand. They’re not only polished and powerful. They’re paid for.
 
And thus the “steal, steal, steal” advice we have to offer here: 
 
Steal from every great marketing piece you have, to create other great marketing pieces. 
 
Fine. We’ll be polite. We can say “leverage,” if you like. 
 
Fact is, too many clients get so caught up in their own marketing materials that they feel compelled to create something new every single time, when reality dictates the exact opposite: Never flatter yourself into thinking that some prospect has not only read, but memorized your entire website, and then will be put off, or offended, when they review your brochure which includes, effectively, the exact same content. 
 
So our client’s mistake here wasn’t uncommon. This was the trap they fell into. They just fell a lot harder than most. Their biggest mistake: Opting to “surprise us” while they worked on this thing—from ideation through completion—in the background. Boy, could we ever have nipped this in the bud—and saved them a ton of headaches, aggravation, time, and most especially money—in the process. 
 
Use web content for brochures. Leverage brochures for social ads. Use print copy for radio. Sales-sheet images for case studies. Video-script voiceover text for emails. It just goes on and on. Steal, steal, steal.
 
One other way to look at this: If you do the opposite, you diminish your brand. You’ve got all these disparate looks and messages, and no target will ever connect those dots. But when it’s all unified and coordinated—which is actually easier, and less effort—your brand appears huge, unavoidable, and inevitable. 
 
Need help with branding challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

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