For the past three days, I’ve been feverishly working on the design and layout of a new weekly magazine. 

That I am excercising my design chops is not noteworthy. But as to the why I’m doing it, oddly enough, is.

I was approached by someone here in Amarillo, to help them with taking some raw artwork and source materials and converting them to ads. This person had been approached to create a local news and opinion magazine (with a conservative voice), and needed help, with a deadline looming. Once I learned of the overall plan and the scope of what they were trying to accomplish, I suggested they needed a lot more help than just with ad layout. You see, this was to be a prototype – a proof of concept publication, if you will. The idea was to test the waters with one issue, using it to attract advertisers, writers, and investors, with the intent of moving to publishing on a weekly basis in January. 

Lord knows, I’ve done a lot of magazine layout. Thing is, when you’re designing a magazine, all the hard work is front-loaded. Even if you cut a lot of corners to make a deadline, there are certain things you’ve got to do to make it work – defining type choices for copy and heads, setting up a layout grid, determining how much space each article gets, figuring out which pages get color, et cetera. Once those decisions are made, a lot of the weekly work becomes a lot more automatic, given the capabilities of tools like InDesign. 

As do most people that don’t design for a living, my friend’s expectations of how long it would take to design a publication from the ground up was, shall we say, a gross under-estimation of what it really took to pull it off. That did not surprise me. What did surprise me was that both he and the publisher had a mindset of “get it out the door” rather than “make it perfect.” 

Here’s where this story becomes germaine to the study of marketing. 

Turns out that a prototype/proof of concept magazine issue plays by exactly the same rules as a demo tape does for a musician. A lot of people think a demo tape (or nowadays, a demo CD or MP3 track) can be a little rough. “They’ll see what I was going for – doesn’t matter if it’s a little out-of-tune/sloppy/imprecise.” 

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. It matters. A lot. 

Here’s the deal: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Sounds trite, but it’s true. No advertiser will look at a prototype issue and say to themselves, “I’ll put an ad in here, and trust that the next few issues will look a lot more professional than this thing they obviously threw together.” Nope. They’ll ALL think, “You know, this thing looks like amateur night. Great idea…bad execution. I think I’ll pass.” Now they won’t tell you that, but that is what they’ll be thinking. Trust me. 

The same holds true with investors, and everybody else that looks at it. If it looks flawless, they’ll assume that it will be even better, later. If it is flawed, they’ll assume that it will never get any better. Think of it this way – lets say you’re going to a party without a date, with the intention of meeting someone at the party and hitting it off. Are you going to skip a bath, a shave, and putting on your best-looking clothes? I don’t think so. 

So I busted my backside in order to make this thing look as good as I could, within the time available. If I’d had my ‘druthers, I would have taken a few more days to take it one step past a ‘workable’ idea and move up a level to a really good idea. Time was not a luxury the publisher could afford, so I went with the best I could do with the time I had available. 

In the end, the publisher (screaming about holding the press time) and the editor (having to deal with a screaming publisher) agreed – the final piece we shipped to the printer was worth it. My guess is that, if the concept flies, and gets funding/advertisers, it will be because of – and not in spite of – the prototype. That’s a happy thing. But it also serves as a lesson for your marketing. When you’re trying to attract new customers, it’s not the time to cut corners. If you’re selling something new – or trying to sell to new customers, remember, your best foot forward will give you the best shot at the results you want.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:37 pm and is filed under marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.