The Business Card: Your Best Brand Buddy

These days, while every company large and small races to get themselves suited up with iPhone apps, mobile marketing campaigns, Web 2.0 sites, blogs, Flickr Accounts, Vimeo and YouTube pages, Twitter feeds and so on – I’m tired just writing that list – it’s good to remember that a strong brand story can just as easily be communicated with a smart idea using the simplest of tools.

Witness the humble business card. I worked at an advertising agency years ago called The Alligator Group, and our business cards had an anatomically accurate bite die-cut off the side; a bite that we had researched with the help of a veterinary dentist to ensure accuracy. Like most advertising and marketing firms, creating advertising for ourselves was way down on the bottom of the to-do list, somewhere after replenishing the cereal cupboard, or clearing out the paper samples shelf. However, these gator-bitten cards were the best promotional tool we could have ever done. Everyone commented on them. Everyone remembered them. People asked for extras to give away to friends. I don’t have stats to back it up but I bet a huge percentage of the contracts that company won began by someone being impressed with the business card.

That was a case of a card that reinforced the name of the company, The Alligator Group. Others I’ve found online are far smarter, and actually reinforce the brand promise or consumer benefit.

There’s the carpenter who has business cards printed on the back of sandpaper. 

There’s the direct mail processing house that prints business cards on tiny white envelopes (the kind you get floral greeting cards in).

There’s the divorce lawyer who has a business card that is perforated down the middle, so it can be divided in half.

There’s the Adventure tour planners who have cards printed on beef jerky (for emergency rations when you are lost).

There are even whole blogs devoted to creative business cards. Some are just nifty. Others are brilliant. CreativeBits is one you might want to check out.

And of course, recently, people have starting handing me business cards that are memory sticks, or miniature CD-Roms, or pens with a USB gizmo attached. I hate these. They force me to DO something in order to find out what I want to know which is: how do I reach you and what do you do and, most important, why should I care?

The point is this: most of the time when you meet someone face-to-face, the first thing you do is hand out a business card. If your card can be unique and reinforce your special niche or your brand promise, you will have begun a new relationship in a very powerful way. You’re no longer just “Bob, that guy I met last night.” Now you are “Bob, the city’s only antique taxidermy restoration specialist.”

This is obviously more difficult to do if your company is a bank or an insurance company or some other professional services firm. Chances are you have standard cards designed by HQ and no opportunity to muck about with them. And for some of these kinds of firms, it’s probably best to just do what you’re told.

But if you are an entrepreneur, or a retailer, or anyone involved in selling a good or a service, don’t forget to think hard about your business card. It’s the first impression you make, and it may be the last impression many of your customers ever see from your company. Consider hiring a design firm to do something smart and memorable and appropriate to your brand and your industry. It will be worth the investment.