How To Compare Your Brochures Competitively

By Author: Kaye Z. Marks
Total Articles: 252
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What really makes a great color brochure? When you compare two types of professional brochures, which kind of brochure printing wins out?

It can sometimes be hard to judge color brochures competitively. This is especially true when you are trying out your own kind of printing since it will be hard to know what is great or competitive and what is just too much and crazy. Therefore, to help you out, I am going to teach you how to judge competitively. By judging, using the criteria below, it should be easy to determine which is better or best. Hopefully this helps you out to gauge where your own lie in the competitive scale, giving you some indications of where you need to focus on to improve them.

1. Material quality - Judging the material quality boils down to the paper. In terms of paper quality, you will need to see how thick it is and how smooth or glossy it is. The thicker the paper material, the better since this adds to the durability. Glossiness on the other hand will add that professional gleam that makes it look like it is a high quality print. The smoother and the glossier the paper material appears, ...
... the better. So judge the material quality via the thickness and the glossiness of the paper.

2. Cut and fold quality - Beyond materials, you should judge via their cut and fold quality. Great outputs will always have accurate cuts and straight folds. There should be no odd bending or extra creases on the fold and of course, each cut must be clean with no odd shavings or perforation. Also, try to check alignments by looking at content borders and the actual cuts. All these point to the precision of your printing company, and if they are as clean and straight as possible then it is indeed competitive. Otherwise, it might still have many problems to work out.

3. Image quality - You can also judge via the image quality. A great competitive custom brochure will always have clean, neat and clear images in its panels. No pixels should be visible in the images and of course color quality must be vivid and the images sharp. If none of these factors is present in the images then it is not of professional competitive quality. Make sure that you avoid this from happening to you by using high-resolution enhanced images for the best possible results.

4. Text style quality - Competitive ones are also judged by text style. If such uses boring old fonts and has little or no extra formatting, then it is not as competitive and may not succeed. However, if font styles are up to date with some uses of bolds, italics and even font size variations, then the color brochure is more dynamic, engaging and of course competitive as well. So check and see if where yours are in terms of text font styles.

5. Content quality - Finally and perhaps most important of all is the content quality. The content of a competitive output is always concise, short and easy to understand. There should be a restraint in using adjectives and all content must point to a logical conclusion. Otherwise, it the content has only 50% worth of real information and 50% worth of stylistic nonsense, the brochure will not really be as effective as you think it would be. So review carefully all your content and make sure that it really is optimized with real value given to readers.

These important elements will help you compare competitively. Use the criteria above to accurately figure out if your own color brochures can stand up to others in a competitive market.

Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of the developments in brochures and brochure printing that help businesses in their marketing and advertising campaigns.