When you look around and research what people think the purpose of a brochure is you find suggestions such as:
“The first question you need to ask yourself is ‘What does my company want this brochure to do?’ or ‘What purpose will the brochure serve?’ and ‘What target audience is it intended to reach?’”
When you then research what the answers to these questions are you get things like: ‘to provide information’; ‘to enhance our image’; ‘as a PR tool’; ‘to provide product information’.
Then when you Google ‘WHAT IS A BROCHURE SITE?’ this is the answer you get: “A small web site consisting of the basic information about an organisation. This would be similar in content to a flyer or leaflet.”
Made us think.
And what we thought was that all the definitions are pretty mealy mouthed and miss the point.
The point being that the purpose is surely to MARKET [i.e. engage in the commercial promotion, sale, or distribution of Z] or SELL [i.e. deal: do business].
If it isn’t then why would any business add to costs by producing said brochure?
[Back to mealy mouthed answers there!]
Does it not follow then that a “brochure site” must also market or sell? Yet, when there are over 500,000 business websites in the UK, only about 26,000 of them are ‘trading online’. What does that say about the other 474,000?
All this at a time when internet shopping has, according to IMRG, reached 10% of retail sales in the UK and £80 billion of consumer spending is on or influenced by the internet, of which:
1. £30 billion of RETAIL spending is online
2. £20 billion of OTHER CONSUMER spending is online
3. a further £30 billion of OFFLINE RETAIL sales is impacted by internet information, research or stimuli
4. 10% of retail sales now take place online
5. e-retail sales have grown at an average year-on-year rate of 45% for the past 6 months
6. e-retail sales have grown 2,000% in 6 years
7. 44% of shoppers polled expect their online shopping to increase in the next 12 months
8. 90% had researched goods online then bought them offline
9. 52% of consumers plan to reduce their high street spending in 2006
All this when a really good shopping cart costs less than £400 [yes, we sell them] and organizations such as Business West allow you to claim up to £500 worth of website development funding from IT @ Work Online. [Which we, of course, can help with!]
The world sometimes seems very strange!
About The Author:
Richard Hill is a Director of E-CRM Solutions, that specialises in CRM, direct and internet marketing [http://www.e-crm.co.uk] for SMEs. He is non-executive Chairman of Innovantage [http://www.innovantage.co.uk] a business intelligence company and a non-executive director of Innovecom [http://www.innovecom.com] a computer networking company.
