Nobody reads your brochure, except the one person who decides.

We have used “sounds like a brochure” as an insult eight times on this website. Hard on brochures. Fair on how most of them are written. A brochure is a strange piece of copy: it costs real money to print, it changes hands at the moment of most attention, and almost nobody writing one has pictured who will read it.

Who actually reads it

Picture the tri-fold picked up at a stall in Gandhinagar. Forty others went into the same bag. Most of them will be found in March. But the one that matters gets read that evening, and the person reading it was never at the stall. The visitor's business partner. The father who still signs the cheques. The purchase head who sent a junior to walk the floor. The partner at home who does the clinic's accounts and will be asked at dinner whether the new dental chair is worth it.

That is the job. A brochure is the only piece of copy that travels without you. It lets the person who met you make your case to the person who didn't, and it has to do that in the back seat of a car in about ninety seconds.

Every outreach mail we wrote for SELEQT's hospital programme ends by asking to be pointed to whoever handles staff training, and attaches a short brief for them. The mail was for the person who opened it. The brief was for the person it got forwarded to. Most brochures are that brief, printed.

The cover says what you do, for whom

Name, logo, and one line a stranger can act on. “Industrial pumps for textile mills, serviced within a day anywhere in Gujarat.” Skip “Excellence since 1994”, which is a date with a mood, and the tagline the agency sold you. A person picking it off a reception table should know in two seconds whether it is for them.

The test is the one we use for a homepage headline. Cover the logo and hand it to someone outside the company. If they can't say what you sell and to whom, the cover has failed, and nobody opens a cover that failed.

Inside: the three questions the reader will be asked

The person who wasn't in the meeting will ask the person who was exactly three things. What do they do, exactly? How does it work, and what does it cost? Why them and not the one we use now? Lay out the inside in that order and you have written the conversation for them.

• What you do, in the order a customer buys it, with the main thing first and biggest. Forty services in two columns says the opposite of what you meant: if everything is a speciality, nothing is.
• How it works. What happens after the call: the visit, the quote, the timeline, who they will deal with. The reader is working out how much trouble you are going to be.
• Why you. Named clients, a photograph of real work, one number you can stand behind, one quote from a customer with a name and a designation. Three real things beat a paragraph about commitment to quality.

A brochure is read in the back seat of a car, by someone who wasn't in the meeting, in ninety seconds. Write it for them.

The price, or the shape of one

The person at home wants the number. Our piece on whether to show prices applies here with one difference: a brochure lives for years, and a price printed in it dates the whole thing by next Diwali. Put a “from” price and what moves it on the page, and the current list on a loose sheet tucked inside. The sheet gets reprinted. The brochure doesn't.

The back is a Contact page

A name, a mobile number that rings on a person's desk, an email someone reads, the address with a landmark, and the hours. The generic info@ address and the toll-free number that reaches a call centre can go. The reader who got this far wants to talk to the person who handed the brochure over, or to someone that person would recognise.

What to take out

The chairman's message with the photograph. The mission, the vision and the values, which are the same three paragraphs in every brochure in the city with the company name changed. “Our team of dedicated professionals.” The handshake photograph bought from a stock library. Any of the nine words. A “Why choose us” list your nearest competitor could paste into theirs without editing. If a line could sit in their brochure, it is doing nothing in yours.

The PDF counts too

Most brochures now arrive on WhatsApp after the call, as a PDF. The same rules hold, plus three. The file name is the first line of copy, and “Final_brochure_v3.pdf” reads as badly as it sounds; name it after the company and the year. The first page has to work as a thumbnail two centimetres wide, which is one more argument for a cover with words on it. And keep the file small enough to open on a phone in a moving car, because that is where it will be opened.

Do this with the brochure you have

Pick it up. Cover the logo and hand it to someone outside the company for one minute. Ask them what you sell, who it is for, and what they would do next. If any answer takes longer than the minute, rewrite the cover and the back first; those are the two pages everyone sees. Then take out the chairman's message. The chairman will not notice.