Should you use logic or hedonic messages in your brochure, and which colours are best to choose? And why is it part of public relations? I answer these questions on this episode of SPEAK|pr and include a reference to the Cugelman emotion map which asks which state of mind do you want to put your audience into when they relating to your company. I also look at which colours are going to reflect the way that your company is viewed, even only by the subconscious mind; it's all part of the psychology behind public relations.
Insecure: High-arousal, painful emotions: Red… Optimistic: High-arousal, pleasurable emotions. GREEN Pessimistic: Low-arousal, painful emotions: Black grey Secure: low-arousal, pleasurable emotions: Blue
SPEAK|Pr is for leaders to unlock the value in their organization for free with effective communication and is hosted by international Pr agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Should you use logic or hedonic messages in your brochure, and which colours are best to choose? And why is it part of public relations? I answer these questions on this episode of SPEAK|pr and include a reference to the Cugelman emotion map which asks which state of mind do you want to put your audience into when they relating to your company. I also look at which colours are going to reflect the way that your company is viewed, even only by the subconscious mind; it's all part of the psychology behind public relations.
Insecure: High-arousal, painful emotions: Red… Optimistic: High-arousal, pleasurable emotions. GREEN Pessimistic: Low-arousal, painful emotions: Black grey Secure: low-arousal, pleasurable emotions: Blue
SPEAK|Pr is for leaders to unlock the value in their organization for free with effective communication and is hosted by international Pr agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
With my experience of over 25 years of being an entrepreneur and starting companies on three different continents, I want to share tools and technologies with you that I know will work to help a company to get noticed, and one of them is the brochure. It may seem simple enough, but it actually has two basic models through which people process information. Color also affects the way the brochure will impact the reader. And so today, I'm going to talk about different ways to come up with effective brochures. The point of a brochure is to be convenient and convince a customer to take action. The challenge right now is that the coronavirus can survive even on inanimate objects like paper. So, how are we going to share information that isn't a website, a tweet, a Facebook or social media post, but is a longer-form piece of information that's carrying the public relations messages, the sales messages, and the functional information about what our organization or our company is doing? My first job in 1990 was actually as a copywriter at an advertising agency here in the UK. We were crafting adverts and brochures, and sending them through direct mail. At the time, one of the main limiting factors was space. To some degree, we've still got that limitation even if we're sending brochures out as PDFs. When it comes to brochures, there are two different models by which people will process information, and this is perhaps a good place to start when we're thinking about how we're going to approach writing a brochure. I want to talk about brochures, because if people have already read about the company or the organization, the brochure could well be the next piece of information they receive, or if they are going into a venue for example, the brochure really fulfils all the point of sale information exchanged between the company and that person. Therefore, it's mission critical that having spent all that time and effort to get somebody to the venue, to the company, or to the restaurant that the brochure communicates the next stage of information that the company needs in order to get the potential partner, customer, or employee from a stage of being ignorant to being aware to being engaged and then to becoming a participant with that company. I mentioned there are two basic models around how individuals process information. One is called the consumer processing model or CPM, and the second is the hedonic experiential model. The former focuses on rational thinking, while the latter is the feeling or emotional model. When we're thinking about the brochure, we need to consider which approach we're going to take. When writing a press release, we might take a view about the product or the service we're marketing. As we're going to be processing information through a filter or a journalist, we might be appealing to the journalist's emotional side, but they're going take a cold hard look at that press release to see whether it's really news or not. On the other hand, if we are writing a brochure that's going to be going into the hands of the person that we want to take action, then this is perhaps a good place to start. With the two approaches, it doesn't mean that one can use only one or the other. Companies can use them both at different times for different reasons. The CPM or the logic-based model can be used, for instance, for product details, product brochures, product catalogues, or menus. If we want to give people direct information, features, benefits, or advantages of a product, CPM is the way to go. When I was writing brochures for business-to-business clients in the ad agency I worked at, we were very much implementing the CPM model. We were looking to have the product be seen as solving a need. The CPM needs to align with the brand voice and the target audience, of co rse, and one method or one appro ch is to look at the logic based content. This can also then pply to the training, as I am wo king on for my SPEAK|pr Maste mind course. The second model is the hedonic experiential model, and it's based around building an emotional response. There was a report in 2016 by Nielsen, a market research company, suggesting that ads that generated emotional response got a 23% uplift in sales volume. One would assume that if that's for advertising, that's also working for brochures. There are a few emotions that psychologists bring us to, and they have classified them as humor, making people laugh, making people afraid, giving people a sense of excitement, or giving people a sense of sadness. If we can decide which emotion we are trying to drive, then that dictates the nature of the brochure, because it determines the images that are shown, the text that's used, and even the structure. For instance, if you look at brochures around Valentine's Day chocolates, they're in the shape of a heart. For a locksmith, you can have a brochure in the shape of a key. Form and function are clearly decided by the emotion that we want to elicit. Humor elicits the greatest memorability. Then there's the fear advert, which can be a bit more tricky and could turn people off. With insurance or anti-smoking campaigns, there's the fear element that we're trying to elicit. Then there's excitement, which is obviously one of the main ones people play on, like when it comes travel, thrills, and cars. Next emotion is sadness or pulling on the heartstrings. We get this around Christmas time or charity events, where there is the information being shared about what would happen to these people if they were not helped. Also, you can even pair emotions together. So, which emotions are we hoping to elicit from people reading our brochures? And how are we going to address those in the brochure? The next dimension that we can think about is the color of the brochure, the images, and also the font of the brochure. As a general rule, blue creates the sense of tranquillity, security, integrity, peace, and loyalty. Silver is glamour and high tech, probably why Mercedes cars are always displayed in silver. Tan, interestingly enough, is seen to be dependable, flexible, crisp, and conservative. There's a whole scope that we can think about both for the logo but also for the brochure backgrounds and for the images. So, the kind of emotions that we want to elicit from people will be impacted not only by the text that we write, but also the background of the colors. There is an emotion map created by a chap named Cugelman. It has four quadrants where you are trying to position the reader or the person you're talking to. The first one is 'insecure,' to put that person in a place of high arousal, but with painful emotions. They suggest red as a color to use in those situations. For high arousal, I've got my SPEAK|pr Mastermind in red, but then I've also got grey as a counterpoint. I'm not trying to create power painful emotions, so I need to rethink that colour scheme. The second quadrant Cugelman talks about is'optimistic,' where we want to have the reader to be in a state of high arousal where they're thinking about pleasurable emotions. Green is the color of optimism, which makes sense because it's the color of nature. Then there's the
'pessimistic' quadrant:
low arousal, painful emotions, the use of black and grey in and around what we do. It's interesting when people use, for example, a black background with gold lettering, because that's a low arousal possibly painful emotion with the sense of exclusivity blended in. The fourth quadrant is 'security,' low arousal, but pleasurable emotions, and that's the color blue. That's why we see so many logos in blue. How can we use the Cugelman emotion map when we're thinking about the brochures that we write? When I'm thinking about delivering a brochure for a Mastermind, I want it to empower business owners and organization leaders to build their own public relations program without an agency but using an agency methodology, and I need to really think about which quadrant I'd like those people to be in when they read the brochure. Now that we've looked at the emotional aspects, we now need to look at some of the other more practical physical elements. The first is, who is the reader? Where are they going to be? And on what device are they going to be reading this? In the old days, we would create an A4- or A5-sized brochure, and we would do matte lamination or vinyl to bring out certain elements that people could see on the homepage. The third page would be the primary position in the brochure, and a double-page spread would allow us to run a picture of a large piece across two pages. That still exists, but not quite with the same tactile feeling that we would have with print. I was sent a brochure today which was seven pages. Back then, you had to print in multiples of two or four, and you had to have a front and a back side. If you had more pages, you had to have it in multiples of four. So, how much space and how many pages are going to be used is another consideration. Once that's decided, we can look for templates on platforms like Canva or Visme. There are no end of templates that are application-specific now. You can find templates for restaurants, for home cleaners, for the vet. You get the idea. Once you've got the template, the content, and the audience, then we can look at the application. Is it going to be handed out or is it going to be used as a workbook? Is it going to be shared or is it going to be private? In the old days, one idea was that you'd have one page that had an extra third on it, and that could be completed and torn off, and people could put that in the post. I'm sharing my age there a little bit, but that was what we used to do. Now, people might click a link to fill out an online form. So, how do we make that brochure have some kind of call to action in order to justify its existence? Once we've decided on the format, we then need to think about what it's going to say. What is the title going to be? Can we make it fun? What is the hook? For the Mastermind, I've got a montage, and one of the elements is the quote that,"Advertising is what you want to say about yourself, but public relations is what people say about you." That pretty much defines the course. It's not what I'm saying. It's what someone else is saying, and I use that as a link into the course. So, if you've got a brochure, what can you use that links the outside world into the good or service that you've got in the brochure? Now, our readers will go through different stages when they're reading our brochure. First of all, they may go through some disinterest, so you've got to have a hook, something interesting enough that is going to draw them in to want to take the next sentence in. With the sentences flowing, hopefully they're getting comprehension. And if you've got the positioning and the pitch right and you're getting some agreement from the reader, the problem that you're talking about, the solution that you're offering is what they need, so you get some agreement from them that the brochure is providing a solution. Once we've got to that place, we're looking for decision-making and then a call to action. I mentioned before about how we used to put a bottom third of one page that could be torn out and sent back. What can you do now to help people take action if they've made a decision? And do you want them to take action now or later? Is it part of a bigger sale? Is your brochure about property? Companies do have great brochures, and they really expect them to be almost coffee book, because people are going to take the brochure and hopefully share it with their friends and their family, as it's a collective decision. Other brochures are pretty much disposable or have a coupon within them, like if you take the brochure to a certain place, you can get a discount or a promotion. So, what kind of function is this going to fulfil? What kind of format is it going to be in? And then ultimately, how is it going to be delivered? Is it going to be a point of sale? Is it going to be something that goes out to people through direct mail? Is it going to be a carry-along with another product? Is it going to be an insert inside a magazine? How people are going to receive this brochure creates another level of complexity and excitement. I'm sharing about brochures, because somebody may have read about or seen your organization online or in the media, and then they ask for more information. They may or may not go to the website for it, but on average, viewing a website takes only a minute to a minute and a half and then people leave. So, a brochure is the opportunity to share more of the solution in a more significant way using either the CPM model, which is this cognitive model, or this HEM or emotional model. With that, have a think about which way you are going to be able to best share the value you're offering to potential customers.