Has Traditional Marketing Collateral become Obsolete?

A simple glossy brochure that projected a company’s statement of value and pedigree was once the norm in a salesman’s toolkit; in many cases it was backed up by a more expansive, and therefore more expensive, catalog that defined his products. He used these as the major selling devices in all presentations and contacts. Furthermore, his customers expected this form of collateral, whether they were a buyer or an engineer. Every vendor and every salesman had boxes of printed literature to hand. The more extensive the product range, the more extensive was the mounds of flyers and datasheets apparently required.

Obsolete Brochures

In the time that it took to create and print this literature, things had changed and often we were all left with out of date materials or brochures that didn’t work as the market had moved in a new direction. Every new marketing manager has had the experience of finding boxes of obsolete glossies that nobody wanted to dispose of due to the original costs.

Then, there was the advent of the DVD as companies, in an effort to be viewed as ‘high-tech” or forward thinking, paid external marketing firms to produce sometimes quite lengthy video brochures which were given away with almost careless abandon. The problem being that together with the high cost, very few customers were willing to sit through watching them. Add some more boxes of ineffective collateral to the dusty pile in the marketing closet!

Then we moved to the Internet and the next round of promotion began. We all internally produced or had built a wonderful web site, often as not with Flash intros that again tried to define us as at the forefront of technology. The problem was that they didn’t change and simply became an online version of the original sales brochure. When it became sufficiently out of date to warrant serious comment we all went through the same process again and rebuilt it continuing the process of eventual marketing obsolescence.

The times they are changing!

And so are the customers.

If a potential customer is interested in a certain product or service, most of them get their information from the internet. Within a short space of time, depending on their Google abilities, they get to know virtually everything that they wanted to know – the good, as well as the bad.

Today, with advent smart devices and the immediacy of the Internet, marketing materials need to be up to date and relevant. Customers are not prepared to accept literature that is out of date when it was printed. They expect solutions that are tailored to them, and they expect collateral that reflects this. 

Company Marketing is Irrelevant?

So, then why do we need product brochures anymore? Has home-grown marketing copy become irrelevant? If you’re reading a company’s product brochure, you already know that you’re not going to read anything untoward. Apart from features, benefits and technical specifications, what use is the rest? The text is always going to be complementary, right?

 But does the fact that the company themselves have produced the text make the result less credible, or less believable? We’ve all read the “we’re the best / you’d be mad to buy anything else” type of corporate nonsense. It’s no wonder most of us take company-sourced marketing content with a pinch of salt.

When user-generated content – social media – is everywhere, marketers have to get in on the act. Companies don’t control their brands. Customers do. The role of a marketer has changed, to now include the creation of user-generated content and use the company’s visibility to push this content to the audience.  

It’s a lot more effort than sending out the occasional press release, updating the website news page, or reprinting the product brochure with new specs and images. But, increasingly, it’s what your audience is expecting of you.