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SingleVoice Marketing® streamlines a company's communications so it sends consistent marketing messages day in and day out.
Have you ever wondered why your foot automatically moves to the
brake pedal when you see a red, octagonal sign at an intersection?
What would happen if you drove into a town which replaced conventional
traffic signs with new, one-of-a-kind versions of its own creation?
It's no accident that your reflexes kick in when you see a STOP sign;
that instinctive response results from your long-time familiarity with a
national system for roadway signage. Take away those familiar shapes and
colors, and the result is confusion, panic...chaos.
A similar form of chaos exists in the marketing programs of companies
from coast to coast.
How many of you work for a company that starts from scratch on every
brochure, ad and trade show exhibit it creates? To customers, these
materials have an effect similar to the aforementioned one-of-a-kind
STOP sign: they may be interesting to look at and contain all the right
information, but they are unfamiliar. For that reason alone, they can be
confusing.
But there is a way out of this chaos. We call it SingleVoice Marketing®.
Wehrman & Company combines strategic planning and research with
high-impact graphic design to create consistent marketing communications
to a client's target market. SingleVoice is based on the theory that the
more consistent and integrated your marketing communications are, the more
effective your marketing and sales efforts can be.
"The key to a good solution is simplicity," says Ken Wehrman, president
of Wehrman & Company. "When a system has too many rules or is too
restrictive, people will fight to get around it.
"The first time you see it, it's not really a system. Through repetition,
you create familiarity, build an identity and eliminate chaos," says Ken.
"The net result is that information is communicated clearly."
SingleVoice systems serve other useful purposes:
It helps control the urge to be new and different. At A.G.
Edwards & Sons, Inc., each department historically had its own
graphic look, according to Bob Leu, corporate art director for the national
brokerage firm. "The problem was, our customers couldn't tell from our
literature that our products all came from the same company." So A.G.
Edwards turned to Wehrman & Company for a uniform, orchestrated presentation
system to give them that consistency -- that "single voice."
It improves quality. A SingleVoice system will enhance quality by
harnessing and directing creativity toward a specific need. By establishing
design guidelines, you also establish general standards for quality and a
mechanism for evaluating performance.
It saves time and money. With SingleVoice you don't have to reinvent the
wheel every time a simple need arises. You can focus on your message, rather
than on how a piece looks. Because decisions about typefaces, paper choices
and other design parameters are established, SingleVoice also reduces the
design and production costs on individual pieces.
Is a SingleVoice system something you can design for yourself?
Bob Leu oversees the work of many talented graphic designers in A.G.
Edwards & Sons' corporate communications department. "But when it came
time to tackle this project, it made a lot more sense to bring in Wehrman
& Company, which really has expertise in this area," Bob says. "They
helped us anticipate issues and avoid pitfalls down the road."
The more decentralized your organization, the greater the need for a
system. Take Insituform Technologies, Inc., a company which rehabilitates
pipelines using trenchless technologies. With offices across the country
and around the world, the company recognized the need to unify the
literature, trade show exhibits and other materials it produced.
"Insituform is involved in a constant education process with its clients,
helping them understand how these technologies work," says Ken. "The
SingleVoice system we developed for them has this education process at its
core. The key visual element of the system is a verbal statement -- the
single most important message that Insituform wants that particular piece
of literature to communicate."
"The system puts a structure in place," says John Kalishman, director of
marketing for Insituform Technologies, Inc. "It immediately spells out to
our readers the importance of the communication at hand. The system also
has another benefit: it forces us to carefully think about the messages
we deliver."
Wehrman & Company, Inc. is a St. Louis marketing communications and Copyright © 1999-2002 | SingleVoice Marketing® is a registered trademark of |
