We present what to keep in mid in 3 steps.
Working on a catalogue is not only about planning the layout of information, aesthetic design or selection of photos. It is, above all, adjusting the whole thing to the specifics of the product or service and the industry in which the company operates. It’s a thorough preliminary study of the offer itself, comparing it with the competition. Discovering strengths and weaknesses and on this basis creating a functional catalogue that will stand out from the competition and work towards your company’s success.
Step 1
CORPORATE IMAGE AUDIT
We start by delving into what you do, what specific services and products you sell, but the main focus is on HOW you do it, i.e. what messages you direct to your clients, what language you use and what your company looks like visually. We check if the image is consistent, what should be improved and what the characteristic elements to be implemented in the catalogue are. Our goal is the highest consistency – all materials must clearly show that they represent the same brand. If your company has a brandbook – be sure to pass it on to us. It’s a solid source of information about how your company intends to look and how it carries out this task.
Step 2
COMPETITION ANALYSIS
Don’t forget about the competition! Of course you need to stand out, but at the same time you should not deviate too much from the standards of the industry. If your company sells specialised products, for example assembly systems, it would be tactless just to describe the product in a picturesque way, without giving precise specifications, product features or principles of operation. That’s why, before we start working, we carefully check how others do it, what they pay attention to, what they emphasize and consider important, and on this basis we develop a scheme of presentation of your products. We also consider what would be good to add that your competitors don’t have and what would make your brand stand out from them.
Step 3
PROJECT CONCLUSIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS
Once we’ve gone through the audit and competitive analysis we briefly try to summarise our findings and give you a simplified overview of what we would like to do. We show good practices and solutions and propose our own. Once we have everything established and the materials have been gathered in advance, we move on to designing a catalogue that we hope will delight.
Our advice
There are many things and stages involved in designing a catalogue. It is important not to take shortcuts and to go through each of them thoroughly, for a simple reason – without a solid foundation, we will not achieve the goal of a functional catalogue.