Cleanpage: marketing insight from Frank Petronio

Philosophy Addendum

March 3, 2006

I’ve decided that there is no point in designing websites unless I can help develop the architecture and content too. My strong suit is not in website design per se, but in delivering the entire package. There is little reward in designing an elegant interface and then having the pages be populated with generic photos and banal copy. Besides, if you want a cheap website, you’re better off buying a template or hiring an Indian or Russian for $5 per hour.

The central theme to my positioning is that my clients decide to work with me because of value, not price. My key argument is that doing high quality work leads to better results. And part of delivering a “high quality” project is scaling it responsibly and realistically — its budget should make sense when compared to its expected return.

Recently I have begun to include a simple “ballpark” analysis of the return on the marketing investment into my proposals. It’s imprecise, for obvious reasons, but it does put the numbers into perspective. For practice I used my 20-20 hindsight to measure how some of my previous jobs performed. What is scary is how many clients made their marketing decisions based on emotional responses rather than “running the numbers.”

Early in my career, an small dental lab (which will remain nameless) had a CEO who fell in love with a stationery sample from my paper supplier. He wanted everything high end: expensive paper, six coats of metallic inks, varnishes, die cuts, and custom watermarks. In the end his stationery cost over $20,000 (I took $1,500 as a design fee — the rest was spent on production.) The client was thrilled with his company’s new look. The printer got an award and I got a sexy portfolio piece. But potential clients were less impressed — they were scared off because the stationery looked too expensive and over the top.

Contrast this with the advice I now give my clients: Buy very high quality business cards on heavy card stock — not those $35 Quick Print cards — because everyone you meet forms a “first impression” from the design and heft of your card. Your business cards are at least as important as the suit you might wear. But bypass the expense of using printed stationery. Instead, have stationery templates professionally designed and print your letters with a decent color printer.

Take the money you save from not printing stationery and use it to buy professional fonts (i.e. not Times or Arial). Get training and learn how to use the simple page layout capabilities of your word processing software so you can incorporate proper typesetting and photos. Furthermore, if you invest in a photo library — placed on your network server — you can incorporate your existing professional quality photos into your regular business letters.

Indeed this approach verges into “Print-On-Demand” territory because you can now “cut-and-paste” your brochure and catalog content directly into a custom, personalized letter. You can dramatically reduce the amount of print materials — catalogs, sell sheets, flyers, brochures — that you need to maintain. Heck, if your customers are internet savvy you can bypass printing (and mailing) altogether and email a PDF complete with live hyperlinks and multimedia. Take the savings and spend it on a super nice capabilities brochure, website, or an ad campaign. Or put it in your pocket (if you own the place, that is…)

Let’s see — nice business cards for your team, a case of the best Crane’s cotton rag paper, a new color printer or two, a larger hard drive for the server, some training and inexpensive software. All of this would cost far less than $20,000 while delivering a greater ROI than fancy stationery alone.

What I am really talking about isn’t stationery at all. I’m talking about making a cultural shift within your company. It means hiring brighter, better skilled people — that cost more — even at the lowest level. It means investing in ideas, planning, design, and training rather than ordering another year’s supply of sales literature. And it’s about focusing on what your customer sees — as a total package — coming out from your company.