Corporate publishing: Rumpelstiltskin in the mailbox

Customer magazines have an impact. They create trust and emotionally bind customers to the brand once they have been won over. Provided the magazine appeals to them. This decision only takes a moment when sorting through the mail. The image, format, paper, size, headlines and, of course, the name of the magazine are recorded. The questions "Do I like it? Am I interested? Do I know the sender?" are answered spontaneously with a yes or no from the gut. Within fractions of a second. Intuition processes 11 million sensory perceptions per second, while the conscious mind processes just 40, so hardly anyone will bother to reflect on the decision they have already made.
So what does it take to ensure that as many questions as possible are answered in the affirmative? The first step is to choose the brand as the magazine name. Satisfied customers are very likely to perceive the magazine as a thank you for their choice of brand. Fantasy names, however, make it more difficult to achieve the goal of emotionally binding customers to the brand. In terms of content, they also tempt you to stray into thematic arbitrariness and lose sight of the focus on the main task: namely to communicate the world of the brand. An example: The owner of a renowned watch and jewelry store likes Zieger. That's why he wants to dedicate an article in his magazine to the Glarus specialty. But the realization, a simple product portrait, is more irritating than surprising.
Customer magazines should fulfill the expectations of the brand and its world. Nevertheless, surprises are welcome in the content. A contradiction? No. If the basic concept is well thought out and the focus of the content is on the brand world, it is possible to link topics that seem strange at first glance. In the case of Zieger, for example, the formally attractive Ziegerstöckli could have been integrated into a still life with emerald jewelry. Or the editor of the magazine could have told his customers why he loves Zieger and perhaps even revealed his own Zieger recipes. Et voilà! The connection between the brand and the foreign object would have been successful. Surprising and plausible.
Meeting expectations and at the same time surprising with ideas is just one of the many challenges that a customer magazine poses for its creators. It takes passion, know-how and a lot of work. Or as Wolf Schneider, the teacher of the German language, aptly puts it: "Someone always has to struggle: either the maker or the reader!"
Christa Löpfe-Feldmann
Christa Löpfe-Feldmann is a specialist in media projects and corporate publishing. The former
Annabelle's editor-in-chief is the main lecturer on the "Corporate Publications - print & online" course at Schreibszene Schweiz.

In September 2009, the New diploma course from Schreibszene Schweiz: Corporate publications - print & online. The course is aimed at communication specialists, copywriters and journalists who want to learn corporate journalism in a practical and well-founded manner. It is the only course of study in Switzerland to include practical days in newspaper editorial offices and agencies, with clients and printers in addition to the theoretical part. On site, students exchange ideas with editors-in-chief and agency managers, develop concepts or solve case studies - and thus apply what they have learned in practice.
In addition, the training places just as much emphasis on modern digital corporate publications as on printed corporate media, in the conviction that today only such cross-media concepts guarantee successful, contemporary corporate publishing. www.schreibszene.ch