Citing A Business Brochure As Reference

By Author: Colleen Davis
Total Articles: 100
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We all know that brochures are generally produced by businesses as part of their marketing campaign to make their products, promotions, or services known. At other times, these materials are also used to make the people know more about their company, such as their mission and vision, branches, objectives, officers, and staff. That is why brochure printing may as well be considered as an informational campaign of most institutions.

For this reason, brochures are considered as intellectual properties of the businesses that produced them. And therefore, these advertising materials are copyright protected. They were made especially by the company’s staff or advertising agency specifically for the business intended. Although the name of the writer is not normally indicated in the printed output, the name of the company and the material could be cited as a resource. Making reference citations for a company brochure is much similar to doing it with other published titles. Below are some guidelines to take into consideration.

1. When you cite a brochure, consider it as a copyrighted intellectual property. It may be ...
... true that brochures may well as be considered ads because of the blatant advertising message, but the information contained therein belongs to the company that published it and the author that was commissioned to write the copy. So you have no right to plagiarize it in any form.

2. But when you cite a brochure as reference, it should be as a piece of corporate literature or the work of a corporate writer, not a singular author. While the author could be a for-profit commercial institution or a non-profit organization, it does not matter. The corporate author still has the same rights and privileges as that of an individual author.

3. You should not mislead your readers. You should specifically identify that your source publication is a brochure and not a book or magazine article. This means that when you input the publication information under your work, you should put the word "Brochure" in brackets before the citation. Below is an example of properly citing a brochure for your article or research paper:

"Growing Organic Vegetables. (2008). How to Make Organic Fertilizer (1sted.) [Brochure].Fresh Start Organics: Author."

As you can see in the example above, the name of the company that produced the brochure was referred to as the corporate author, which was Fresh Start Organics. But if the individual writer’s name was indicated on the brochure then it is also worth mentioning. Give credit to where credit is due.

Brochures can be great resources for whatever it is that you are writing. But just because you think that it is just an advertising material doesn’t mean that you can already just copy its contents like they were your own. On the contrary, while it is just given for free most of the time, companies invest so much on their brochure printing to make it informative and look good. They pay people to write the content as well as do the design and layout. And these materials are printed by professional printing houses using good quality materials so that means they have invested a great deal on their materials. The least that you could do is to cite them as a source if ever you are going to use some information contained therein.

For more information, you can visit this page on brochure printing