Marketing Binder Entry #4: Campus Crusade for Christ Booklet

I was awaiting the start of my weekly Wednesdays conference call when two members of the Korean Campus Crusade for Christ (KCCC) came up to me and asked for five minutes of my time.  After a couple of refusals, their persistence paid off and I finally relented and let them preach to me.  One of the members whipped out his trusty booklet and began reading from it.

That is when I noticed how terribly done their sales collateral was.

Long, tacky title with an uninspired font and color scheme. And that's just the beginning!  See the whole booklet here

Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws? is a booklet published by the Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) and the whole design of the booklet just screams amateur.  It looks like something someone whipped up on Microsoft Word 97 and then never got around to updating it for the new millennium.

Below are two pages from the booklet:

There are a host of problems with them, but the most notable are:

1. Lack of color - I imagine CCC is already paying for color printing due to the yellow, so why not use other colors to spruce up the text and make things pop?  Also images in black and white in this day and age of cheap color printing is a crime.
2. Text heavy/bad formatting - Shorter headers and bullet points would have helped the reader grasp the message more quickly.  Overly repetitious headers, pushes the reader to gloss over the material.  The last paragraph should have been broken up into bullets not only for the reader, but for the presenter of the booklet as well.  Bullets in the form of incomplete sentences force the presenter to put things in their own words, making the whole presentation much more interesting and lively.  Reading a sales pitch in front of someone is a surefire way to lose a sale.  
3. Confusing image - There are too many elements in the image to grasp at a glance.  It fails to convey to the reader immediately how they are missing out on happiness due to the lack of Christ.  
4. Fails to answer "So What?" - The text fails to make immediately clear what is the benefit for receiving Christ.  Reading through the headers and quotes the reader is left asking so what? The value proposition is simply not there. 

Closing thoughts

The flyers and posters put up by other Christian groups such as Intervarsity and they just blow what KCCC does out of the water.  It is a hyper competitive market out on the UCSD campus with dozens of fellowships and churches vying for converts.  Having subpar collateral is just not going to cut it.