Why Web to Print? Because People Are Breaking Your Brand

Your marketing department could really use some extra headcount. Or could they?

In my last article, I explored the concept of understaffed marketing teams and floated the possibility that we should focus less on hiring more staff and more on fixing broken processes.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, no matter how many people you add to an inefficient, time-consuming process, it’s still going to be inefficient and time-consuming. You’ll have more people in each communication loop. More calls to make and emails to send. More approvers for every project.

Web-to-Print solutions offer an alternative by helping marketing teams streamline broken processes. But more on that soon. For today, I want to focus on another common consequence of broken processes: broken brands.

How Brands Break

Suppose Tom from Field Sales approaches Nancy in Marketing to request a French-language product brochure for the company’s audience in Quebec.

Nancy responds, “Yes, we can do it! But we’re going to need four weeks.”

Tom nearly falls over. “Four weeks?! But we have a trade show in three weeks.”

We all know the story won’t end here. Tom and his Field Sales guys immediately decide to make their own French-language product brochure. They translate the entire brochure into French, mock up a Word document that looks somewhat like the corporate brochure, stick some stock photography in the document, and doctor the corporate logo to add the phrase “Canadian Division.”

Yikes.

Will anyone be able to tell the difference in the finished product? Of course. They’ll see grainy photos, pixelly logos, ragged layout, and choppy language, and they’ll begin to form a less-than-professional impression of this company.

Of course, not all incidents of brand-breaking are this dramatic, but they can still hurt your organization’s image. Does your organization have marketing staff spread out across multiple locations? How sure are you that everyone has access to the latest templates, logos, corporate colors, and boilerplate product descriptions?

Who’s in charge of quality control for the various pieces of collateral these different locations could be producing? In other words, is it possible someone is breaking your brand right now without even realizing it? And is it also possible that someone, somewhere, is wasting marketing budget by ordering pieces that won’t even be usable due to design flaws that won’t be noticed until they’re delivered?

How Web-to-Print Services Prevent Brand Abuse

When inefficient processes prevent Marketing from offering the level of service the entire organization demands, other departments go renegade and the brand gets broken. Don’t let this happen to you. Explore your options for Web-to-Print solutions.

The typical Web-to-Print process automates and streamlines many of the tasks required to implement marketing collateral. Just as importantly, it usually involves an approver who must review and sign off on certain types of orders before they go to print. You can designate a marketing manager or other seasoned veteran to take on this responsibility.

With that kind of centralized control over your collateral, the changes of someone breaking your brand are suddenly slim to none. Sound good? Find out more about Web-to-Print services today.