Every time I post a brochure to a client and see how much it costs I get depressed. In January we spent in the region of ú10,000 sending out our various brochures.
The enquiries from abroad are especially expensive and we always argue as to whether it’s worth sending the brochures in the first place. It now costs us more to post the brochure than it does to produce it. What a sorry state of affairs, but how good for the Royal Mail.
Unfortunately, the brochure is our calling card. Edna, in our retail travel agency, always runs her hand over the front cover of a new brochure and purrs with delight if she encounters the odd bit of UV varnish on a satisfyingly thick, cardboard-like cover. The fact that UV varnish is environmentally unfriendly in the extreme does not matter to most of us because we don’t know that it is so.
A heavy, expensively produced brochure, printed on bright, white, thick paper gives any product an upmarket feel and enables us to charge more for the holidays featured.
The waste is enormous, especially as between 10 and 20 brochures are required per person booked, and in some cases the number required is even higher.
Brochure and distribution costs per person carried therefore work out to be somewhere between ú12 and ú15, let alone the advertising and marketing cost.
Do away with the brochure and the profitability of the whole industry would soar and tens of thousands of trees would be saved in order to serve a more useful purpose. The trouble is that there is currently nothing that can replace the brochure and I feel that there never will be.
No CD-ROM, Internet page or television screen can ever give the convenience, speed or the ease of simply flicking through the pages of a catalogue.
The technology has not been invented to replace the brochure. You would need to plant a microchip containing the pages in the reader’s brain in order to compete. I believe that, in Germany, the travel industry has agreed to standardisation of brochure production quality. I cannot remember where I read this, who told me or even if it is true.
No matter, because it really is a very good idea. If we all agreed to print on really thin recycled paper and were forced to use the latest and best environmentally friendly printing techniques, then we would be taking a bold step towards stemming the enormous waste that we perpetuate from year to year.
Why should an upmarket (how I hate this phrase) holiday be marketed on more expensive paper? If we were forced to follow some standard guidelines for brochure production then we could concentrate on making sure that it was the actual holiday that delivered quality rather than the paper it was printed on.
Over the years, Suzi Stembridge at Filoxenia has bent my ear about charging for brochures, and companies like Laskarina actually have had a price printed on the front cover.
The problems of charging would be insurmountable, especially if marketing is done through agents. However, if the four market leaders jointly decided to follow a uniform and environmentally correct policy on brochure production and the rest of us were forced to follow, what a better place the world would be.