11
O P I N I O N
Content is king
Only after the content is the best it can be should you worry about packaging the information. Otherwise, the information is pretty but empty.
I s a picture worth 1,000 words? Yes. Are we visual learners? Yes. Are we enticed when a document looks great and has a nice layout? Yes. Do people judge books by their covers? Of course, but they shouldn’t! Let’s say you see a movie poster that blows your mind, inspiring you to see the movie right then and there. Let’s also say the movie was picture-perfect, with astonishing cinematography, impeccable set designs, and costumes “to die for.” There’s one little catch: The story was horrible, boring, and full of crater-sized plot holes. Would you say you liked the movie and recommend others to go to the theater? Probably not.
Javier Suarez POP MARKETING
The same can be said about proposals, especially in this era of InDesign addicts. The new normal is that submittals look amazing; some even resemble magazines. Fun! This is all great and extremely important, but not at the expense of one simple thing: Content. There are a million reasons why this has become an issue in A/E firms in the last decade, so let’s discuss a few of them. ❚ ❚ Increased competition. Once the industry bounced back after the recession, a new trend started
emerging where big firms started pursuing smaller jobs. Now, there can be 20 submittals for an oppor- tunity that in the past attracted only a fraction of those proposals. Naturally, this increased competi- tion resulted in firms going after more and more projects. Some marketing departments shifted their priorities and started functioning like pseudo production lines, cranking out documents one after another. This method sacrifices content creation,
See JAVIER SUAREZ, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER January 15, 2018, ISSUE 1231
Made with FlippingBook Annual report