A Customer-Friendly Brochure
Much industrial marketing material is dropdead dull. But it needn't be. If a company that manages hazardous waste can make what it does look appealing, there's hope for every marketer. In its latest brochure, Evergreen Environmental Group, in Crestwood, Ky., traded mundane photos of microbes and test tubes for colorful back-to-nature illustrations. 'The old brochure didn't say who we are," says Jerry McCandless, president of $ 4,2-million Evergreen.
He opted to portray the end result (a cleaner environment) rather than the engineering means. Customers and prospects have commented favorably on the new brochure, which features an artist's rendition of a deer drinking from a stream. Likewise, Geoffrey Swett, the marketing director for Remediation Technologies (ReTec) in Tucson, searched for images that would do his customers proud. "I looked long and hard to find decent photos of refineries and hazardous-waste ' dumps," he says. Sweet and his Seattle ad agency, McKnight & Co., shopped the stock-photography collections, where handsome, albeit recycled, photos can often be had on the cheap. A small Seattle photo agency, West Stock, supplied seven of the eight industrial slides that grace the cover of ReTec's new and improved company brochure. The rented images lend a clean, artistic touch to the down-and-dirty industries ReTec targets, such as oil refining. The stock photos also allowed ReTec to customize marketing collateral of eight different niches inexpensively. The same eight color slides appear on the cover of ReTec's marketing folder; and in the qualification pack inside, with one differences: the slide appropriate to the industry being targeted is high-lighted in color while the rest are run in black and white. The cost for the multiple usage: about $ 2,300. ReTec also tailors its tradeshow booth using some stock photos. Still, stock images aren't a panacea. For instance, the company must pay for each and every usage. Also, a rival could rent the same image. Says Denise Gaffney, president of McKnight, "There's no substitute for an on-site photo." ReTec recently hired a seasoned environmental photographer to shoot a customer site. The cost: about $ 3,000 for the shoot and photo rights -- but one picture has already yielded a high-ticket sales lead after appearing in ReTec's newsletter. A photo taken for ReTec in 1992 made the cover of Oil & Gas Journal and remains a valuable reprint in ReTec's qualification pack. In any industry plagued by me-too-ism, sharp images can cut through the marketing clutter. ReTec's sales grew 36% last year, to $ 32 million, in a flat industry. |