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O P I N I O N
Are you an amateur? A professional firm should have professional collateral, but all too often, bad photos, poor design, and sloppy writing dilute the brand.
O f course you’re not an amateur. You are a professional. You work for a professional organization. You put the “pro” in professional. So why do you let bad grammar and poor graphic design impair how your firm is represented to the world? We set such high standards for our profession, yet we allow a constant flow of bad brochures, reports, communications, proposals, and presentations to influence our brand image. Even our routine emails to clients say something about our organization and incrementally affect how we are received.
Chad Clinehens
use of center justification, improper indentation, and incorrect spelling are some of the offenders in this category of brand busters. These also represent the most common and most visible of mistakes your people are making in their communications. This is happening all day, every day, in emails, reports, proposals, and presentations. The list goes on. Now that we have moved from verbal communication to almost all written, our shortcomings in this area are greatly enhanced and visible to our audience. “Don’t look like an amateur with bad pictures and written communications, silly fonts and stale messaging.”
Even though there are numerous examples that could be discussed, I’ll focus on the ones that seem to be the most common in this industry: ❚ ❚ Bad pictures. Even though I am seeing improve- ment, this is a huge problem. The improvements I am seeing are mostly driven by technological advances, rather than an intentional strategy to im- prove project pictures. Are you sending your junior staff out to take photos of projects with no direc- tion or training? This is how we end up with images taken through the bug-splattered windshield of the Ford Taurus company car. Pictures of poor pixelated quality, bad angles, people frowning or in odd poses, and pictures that do not show anything meaningful, are just some of the bad graphics that need to be culled from your inventory. ❚ ❚ Bad grammar and spelling. The misuse of me, my- self, or I, incorrect punctuation, jarring fonts, over-
See CHAD CLINEHENS, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER May 9, 2016, ISSUE 1151
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