"The medium is the message."

Marshall McLuhan wasn’t talking about advertising when he coined that phrase, but we think it applies anyway.

If you want prospective customers to see you as a for-real provider of goods or services, it’s important that you look like one. That is to say, if you’re going to promote yourself with ordinary, home-grown advertising and an amateurish website, you’re telling your prospects that you think home-grown and amateurish is good enough. That’s not a message you want to deliver.

The past couple of years have been tough and many of you have been cornered into making do with a bit of DIY that really didn’t do the job. Well, it’s time to move on from that.

Besides, if you think about it, perception being what it is and people being what they are, a better look can help you charge more. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

It won’t cost you that much to get a professional to build your website, develop a marketing communications program or produce creative materials. And it won’t cost you anything to expect the people you have already hired to do those things to do them well. But there are significant dividends for you in the perception department if you do.

We know a guy who doesn’t know a lot about wine, so he usually selects one with what he thinks is a good-looking label. His rationale is that, while he knows vineyards aren’t in the design business, he figures if they aren’t going to go to the trouble to have a good label design done,  how can he believe they are going to make the effort to produce a good wine?

His thinking may be his very own, but the underlying approach makes sense. To paraphrase Forrest Gump “quality is as quality does.”

Your advertising and web presence are expected to do a lot of things. But one of them is to be interesting and well-done enough to get people to be impressed with you and want to look inside or learn more.

So do that.

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