The human race is a lazy, impatient bunch when it comes to reading or taking in information. They want their info, they want it now and they only want to see what they need. How many times have you read or heard the saying “keep it simple stupid” yet we continue to see business owners, managers and marketing professionals flood their advertisng colateral with as much information as they can possibly fit. As small as they are I am constantly asked to fit more and more information on the business cards I design until it is jam packed full of copy.

Many years ago a business cards sole purpose was to give someone your contact details. These days they are used by businesses to try and tell the customer their life story, list every possible product or service they sell, a photo of their van, business phone, mobile phone, ABN number, licence number, fax number, web address, email, myspace address, building address, qualifications and dont forget to make the logo as big as possible, no bigger, bigger still. I mean really….. do you think your potential customer is going to contact you over your competitors because you have more information on your business cards than what your competitors do.

As I said above people are lazy. If they are confronted with a business card or advertising that is loaded with excessive information it is more than likely that none of the info on it is going to be read at all, its too hard, if they dont know where to look to get the most important piece of info within about 1/2 a second they will skip the lot and move on to the next ad or card.

Im quite lucky as I have access to top notch machinery to print my own high quality business cards. I conducted my own experiment by designing two sets of cards. The first was our usual card which had all of our contact details, some nice pics of our equipment on the front and a list of services on the back. The card looked quite nice as far as Im concerned (and Im pretty fussy). The second card simply had our logo very small in one corner our corporate colour as a background and our details small in the other corner which consisted of a name, phone number and email address. 250 of each card was printed and they were placed on the reception desk in our show room right next to each other in their own business card holder. As I said above both designs looked nice but not surprisingly the cards with less info were the ones which were getting taken from the desk, in fact we had to print more of them before even ten were taken from the other pile. The reason behind it was that it was easier for them to find the info they wanted at a glance.

Next time you have your designer tell you “I think there is too much copy” take their word for it and dont be frightened that you cant tell your customer on your cards everything that you do, you may be surprised that “less is more” bet you’ve heard that one before too….

seeya in a couple of days……