Sep 4, 2007
HVTO Q&A:
Elizabeth Gooding
Chief Strategy Officer, NEPS LLC
Founder, Art Plus Technology, Inc.
Elizabeth Gooding is the chief strategy officer of NEPS LLC and the founder of Art Plus Technology, Inc., a strategic consulting firm focused on improving communications in the financial and healthcare industries. Gooding is committed to raising awareness of the benefits of more transparent communication between firms, brokers, and clients. A recognized expert in creative and technical information design, she is widely published in industry journals and has presented on emerging trends in customer communications at the Investment Company Institute General Membership Meeting, the NAVA Marketing Conference and The Shareholder Notice and Access Symposium. Gooding is also the chairperson of the Financial Communications Forum Advisory Council. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Economics and Computer Science from Northeastern University.
Question:
You recently spoke at the TransPromo Summit in New York on the topic, "The Value of Color in Trans-Promo Documents." What was the main message and how did the audience respond?
Answer:
I think the participants found it refreshing to have someone speaking on the value of color who wasn't trying to sell them a color printer or color printing services. The key messages from my presentation was that color has the potential to add value to statements and other documents - but that if not used appropriately color can actually cause more problems. My motto with all so-called trans-promo initiatives is "first, do no harm." Transactional documents have a primary purpose and whatever you layer onto that must not impede the document's ability to satisfy the primary requirement of confirming a transaction or collecting a debt, etc.
Color can influence but it needs to be relevant to the message and you can't rely on color alone since the documents may also be distributed in black and white, or received by people with less than perfect color vision. If you've ever photocopied red on black or green on red, you see what "color blind" people see---a blob of indistinguishable information.
Question:
You included an interesting group of slides on color influencing perception. What was the purpose behind this exercise?
Answer:
It's one thing to tell people what color can do. It's quite another when they can experience it for themselves. Before I reviewed case studies of people using color effectively, I presented some examples of how color can distort, distract, make it difficult to store information in long-term memory and in some cases just make you think " eeewwww." I referred to this as the Dramamine sponsored portion of the presentation. Color, when used effectively, has been proven to provide a cue to help people store information in memory and retrieve it more easily - Pantone has quite a few statistics on this. The participatory experiments at the conference demonstrated that when color is used inappropriately---it can actually reduce comprehension and memory. People found that they could remember the colors of the words in the examples---but not the words themselves.
Question:
How does your message translate into statement based marketing?
Answer:
Design of any document has to start with an understanding of purpose first, then development of the content to support that purpose and finally the effective presentation of the content. Nowhere is this more true than with statements and statement based marketing. You have to define the purpose of the overall statement, the variations for different audiences and then understand the purposes you are trying to fulfill with your messaging and personalization campaigns. This may not be just marketing and cross-selling, but customer service and retention, customer education and influencing behaviors that drive down support costs. Once you have defined the purpose then you can determine which content is primary, secondary, etc. and how pieces of content relate to each other. Then you can start working on the presentation of the content. Maybe variable color will help make the content more memorable---but if it's not the right content at the right time---having it in blue or green isn't going to help much.
Question:
You don't sound like you are very bullish on color. Why is that?
Answer:
It's not that I'm not a fan of the new high-speed, high-quality color technology that is available today - quite the reverse. I just believe that we should under-promise and over-deliver. There is a lot of over promising going on right now. I edited a magazine called e.bill for quite a few years and I saw first hand an entire industry over-estimating and over-promising on what new technology and new business processes could deliver. Everything had an e in front of it or a .com after it and then---POOF. Most of those vendors aren't around today. I don't think that Kodak or Xerox or Oce are going anywhere, but there are some small service bureaus who were promised that buying color technology was going to increase their business - and some of them may not survive the over-promising. From a design perspective, I love to have the option and the opportunity to work in a full color environment. It literally opens up the working palette. Principal Financial is an example of a company that has used full color transactional printing effectively, tastefully and in a manner that consistently supports their branding. They are able to print on plain, roll-fed paper and personalize every document. It's great - but you have to keep in mind that they have the volume, the variety of applications, the technology and the investment in marketing content to make their investment worthwhile.
Question:
How can companies determine if an investment in color technology or color outsourcing is right for them?
Answer:
That's a really good question. The majority of research on color in transaction printing is sponsored by color printer companies. That's sort of like putting pharmaceutical companies in charge of the FDA (or did we already do that?) Most of the time, the "research" shows a before and after example where response to a poorly designed black and white document is compared to a totally redesigned color document. It's like those weight-loss commercial where after you take the diet pill you suddenly have a better haircut, clothes and perfectly clear skin. Hmmm.
If you have the ability to do research yourself---basically test color with a control group of your existing customers, that is the best route. Measure. Experiment. Measure. Repeat. If you don't have the capability to conduct this research in-house then consider this a call to action. We are putting together a multi-company color study and will be working with several outsource vendors to take portions of a customer's current output and print portions in color and black and white with identical messages. The focus is on financial, insurance and healthcare transaction documents. If we can pull enough participants together to make this worthwhile, we'll be publishing results in early 2008. Anyone interested in participating go to the "contact" section of our Web site at www.ArtPlusTechnology.com and send a message with the subject line "color study."