Assuming that you’ve defined your market and done a little research into the product, you might feel that you’re ready to start writing. It is definitely possible to produce materials at this juncture although you’re still short a few pieces of information.

At this point you should ask questions about your company’s:

  culture or values, 

  competitors, 

  customer’s industry sector, 

  budget, and

  distribution  

Unfortunately, you may not have much time to get the answers. (Certainly I’ve been in the position of having to produce new collateral with little more than an interview subject who doesn’t want to talk to me, some product specifications that aren’t particularly relevant to my needs, and an old brochure that nobody likes. This scenario is usually accompanied by two well-known conditions: no time and no money.)
You can use your core research skills and understanding of language to quickly answer these questions for yourself. Let’s start with a couple questions about company culture: Is the company an established leader in its sector or is it a startup? What words are used to describe the company?

Now, pretend you have two companies and contrast these answers (distilled into adjectives) dynamic, exciting, and revolutionary against these, elegant, conservative, and reliable. You see very quickly how different these two companies are and how their collateral is likely to differ.

Next, even if you’re certain that your company occupies a unique position, you’ll want to check your competitors’ collateral. Questions such as: What does it look like? What are the messages? How does our collateral compare to theirs? can help refine your positioning. For example, if your competitor uses messages about vision then adds bird imagery to underscore their message, you should probably avoid birds and make sure that your vision messages contrast with your competitor’s. (Yes, it’s possible that your elegant company and your revolutionary competitor are both using the word vision to position yourselves.)

You’ll also want to get to know your customer’s industry sector as this can make a big difference in how you write. For example, imagine you’re trying to sell ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to the packaging industry. Using terms common to the packaging industry is a better way of grabbing your customer’s attention than using jargon common to your industry sector but incomprehensible to your customer.

In some instances, your chain of customers can get longer. For example, pretend you’re selling new technology to the graphic arts industry (printers). The new technology is visible to the printer’s customer, in this case, graphic designers who will have to change their file preparation habits and, initially, pay more for their print materials. This issue, the impact your new technology will have on your customer’s customer, may be something to consider when producing collateral.

Getting to the last two of my bulleted points, budget and distribution are substantively different from everything else I’ve mentioned. (All the other questions help you to determine positioning.) Budget affects the amount of time you can devote to your project while distribution affects content in a variety of ways. For example, knowing that your brochures are being hand-delivered by the sales team (it does happen) can give your writing a freedom that it doesn’t have when your brochures are being distributed by direct mail.

There’s more to be said about any one of these points but it’s time to move on to writing collateral. In the next article, I’ll be covering brochures, white papers, backgrounders, and more because you’re now ready to write.