A member of the audience of the Washington, DC chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) asked me if I had any opinions on brochures. He shouldn't have gotten me started! My comments on brochures always start civilly enough and end with me ranting and foaming at the mouth. In this case, they went something like this:

Brochures have their place . . . but not on the planet!

Excuse me, I forget myself.

Brochures have their place, but they aren't the foundation of a marketing effort that some people seem to think they are. They aren't essential first steps in founding a firm or a practice or a studio. To the contrary, time spent writing (and bickering) about a brochure is time away from the market and, especially when you are starting up, you need to be out in the market talking with people, not in the office writing. Spend the time you would spend writing a brochure out in the market talking with people and you have a good chance of turning up some business.

Of course, that's one of the comforts of brochure writing; you can postpone having to go out and talk with people. But time is precious during the early days of building a business. If you aren't generating business you're draining cash. Unless, you talk with people, you'll never sell anything! That's the only way you will generate cash flow. In that light, writing a brochure is like planting a flower garden when you are running out of food! Like planting flowers when starvation is staring you in the face! Instead, you should be out in the forest stalking . . .

Excuse me, I got carried away.

With modern desktop publishing technology, you can rapidly put together a presentable leave-behind document and get out in the market immediately. Offerings tend to shift rapidly during the early days of a business, and you can change your desktop document easily and cheaply as you adapt your service and the way you talk about it to the market. You can't do that with a four-color glossy brochure, can you? No, those $3-a-pop wonders will become obsolete in a year and then sit on the shelf collecting dust. Then you'll be sorry you . . .

Ahem.

Better still, before you prepare any document, do some market research. Take four or five potential or past clients to lunch and ask them to comment on you business concept and offerings and the way you intend to talk about them. You will get some great ideas and will have, in the context of the meetings, educated four or five buyers about what you do.

But don't, don't waste precious time and money writing a #*$!!>&^ brochure! The whole *(?>&%!@# is a *&^%)_? ?**&#!! and . . .

At this point, the man who had asked the question cautiously stood up and said, "Yes, but what I really want to know is, do you have an opinion about brochures?