Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

A Perspective Story

Second week of my internship just ended as I just finished my fifth draft on the brochure design. In the past two weeks, I have talked with other consultants in the office and gathered their feedback on the design and content. Additionally, I have also referenced other brochures in the office to get a sense of what those published brochure actually look like.

As I am in the middle of creating my fifth draft on the brochure, I have noticed that making a brochure is not as easy as I first have imagined. A little background on the purpose of this brochure – the firm needs a marketing brochure to promote its consulting competition service which is known as IXL Innovation Olympics. IXL Innovation Olympics is the world’’ largest consulting competition that bridges companies with advanced degree students (MBAs & PhDs) to identify the next innovation growth for the sponsor. This brochure is unlike any other IXL Innovation Olympics brochure since this one is designed specifically for the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore, this brochure has to be targeted to only healthcare/pharmaceutical companies. It is a habit for me to start designing the brochure by telling the clients all the details about this service, how long the firm has been doing this program and how great it is to participate in this program for the clients. However, standing from the client’s perspective, all they really care about is simply the result – what they will get at the end. How you deliver the solution may be little less important in this case because what your solution is makes the deal. So instead of putting so many emphasis on information, it is much more important to focus on persuasion. And in order to create an effective persuasion, you need to understand what your client’s real concern is. So before I started to actually finalize my design, I have to do some research on the industry to figure out what the trend is in the next five or ten years. By really understand the client’s needs, I created a story line for this brochure by first identify some challenges that healthcare companies are facing now in order to build a connection with them. By showing our clients that our firm knows your challenge/problem, it is much easier to evoke an interest from the clients. Then the storyline reveals our solution in the middle and brings them to a result that they wanted – which is five formal business cases from five elite student teams along with twenty-five business concepts, twenty-five opportunity spaces and one-hundred plus of ideas and insights. It might seem easy to realize that one should always prioritize client’s needs, however when you are putting the theory in practice, it is way harder than it seems. You think you know what clients want, but in the reality it’s always you are either not getting the whole picture, or you are missing the most important component that the clients really care about. This design task definitely teach me a meaningful perspective lesson.

Luckily, Babson’s knowledge did help me when I was creating the brochure. I actually applied some Babson SME course skills into this project. For example, when you design anything, it’s important to keep some white-space so the audience is not overwhelmed by overcrowding of information. Secondly, a human mind can only store four to seven key pieces of information shortly, so make sure to emphasize at most seven information on one page to keep the audience fresh and focused on your brochure.  All these design tips are from the SME course – IT class offered at Babson, and I was glad that I can take those fundamentals to a real world setting.