Act of Uniformity

What d'you mean it doesn't fit?

Thankfully, I was born too late to get called up for National Service. That's probably why I spent so many of my formative years listening to the Incredible String Band while wearing loon pants and the outside of a yak. As a result I was spared the joys of a uniform that fitted (and itched) where it touched, and was almost capable of ambulation without its conscripted occupant.

Thinks: Maybe I'll try The Hedgehog Song next

Today the one-size-doesn't-really-fit-anyone approach is found only in Italian driving seats, baths and - yes, you knew I'd say it - presentations. The first two can be ignored because Armitage Shanks has a long tradition of employing alien life forms in its design department, and Italians can justify Fiat by pointing at a Ferrari.

But presentations? No-oo I think not.

Most of your marketing materials have to be fairly generic; you can't afford to change them for every possible customer. But the people in your audience are as individual as the architecture in Orangi Township. A presentation is a rare opportunity to craft your message to fit perfectly.

I regularly hear people refer to their slide "decks". "We'll use our leisure industry deck for this presentation", they announce glibly, and the customisation is complete. But the Financial Director in their audience has more in common with the FD of a double glazing company than with his own IT Manager; where did we get this idea of industry sector being the lodestone of our pitch?

Everyone in the room with you has opinions, biases and agendas. They're the things you have to deal with if you want a successful outcome. So a beautifully logical explanation of the lifetime cost of your proposition won't float the boat of someone who's thinking about this quarter's VAT bill.

Most of the time, your biggest competition comes from inaction, not from your biggest competitor; it's usually easier to do nothing than to take on a huge upheaval to achieve the end you're proposing. To get the decision you want you have to make everyone in your audience want what you're offering enough to put up with the inconvenience of making a decision.  That means it needs to be as personal as a LadyShave.

But most presentations are less bespoke than the grey overalls in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  They deal with a few features and benefits, sure, but mostly they're concerned with telling you about the people behind the pitch.

Which means you might as well have sent a fax.

Look, you're going to spend a couple of hours in front of an important customer.  That's costing you a lot of money. And someone's putting aside a similar amount of time to listen to you, and that's costing them too. 

So talk directly to the people who'll be there, not just their market sector. Think of what you have to offer them, personally, to make their lives a bit - or a lot - better. Make it fit.

If you don't, all they'll feel is a slight itch where you touched the spot.

Going Logo

How would you feel if I treated your logo like this?

Should you include your customer's logo in your presentation?

The jury's still out on this one; just recently a few of my clients have referred to embedding a logo as "a bit nineties". I'd be fascinated to know where this came from, because it seems to have gone viral.

I'm still a fan of displaying the logo; it's a small signal that you've put some thought into personalising the presentation. But if that's all the personalisation you're going to do, it ain't enough.  Both you and your audience are making a big investment of time, so you owe it to yourself as well as them to make it look as though you made the presentation just for this pitch.

I'll deal with personalising the content in another post. For now let's focus on the logo.  Most companies have invested a lot of money and time into their visual identity.  A lot of them have corporate ID manuals that set out rigid rules for how their logo can be displayed.  You're not going to stamp all over that flower bed are you?  No, of course not, because - like people who never move out of the overtaking lane - it's only other people who do that.

One of those other people came to pitch their product to me recently.  The logo at the top of this post came from his presentation.  Know what he was selling? Print and design services.

So just to make sure you don't get mistaken for one of those other people, here are a few play-safe rules for using your customers' logos in your presentations.

Scaling Down=Good. Scaling Up=Bad
When you go looking for your customer's logo, you'll probably start with Google's Image Search. That's fine, so do I.  But make sure that the logo you use is at least as large as you want it to be in your presentation.  If it's too big, scale it down to the right size in Photoshop, taking great care not to alter its proportions.  You could paste it directly into PowerPoint and scale it down on screen, but doing it that way bloats the file size, uses up system resources, and may not look as crisp as a properly resized version.

Never ever scale a too-small logo up by more than around 10%.  When you scale down, information in the image is lost, but Photoshop cleverly smoothes everything out so that it looks fine.  When you scale up, nothing can put that information back.  Individual pixels become large blocks, and it all goes horribly wrong.

Don't take risks with the background

Unless you're very sure of your ground, always put your customer's logo on a white background. Many corporate ID manuals specify allowed background colours - and anything that isn't specified is prohibited. But I've never yet seen an ID that prohibits white.  Don't risk it: white is the safe background.

That doesn't restrict your presentation palette; just make sure you leave a white area that will hold the customer logo.  And please make it look as if it's meant to be there - a floating, closely cropped white rectangle insults your customer's brand almost as badly as a poorly-rendered logo.

Dropping the logo into a lozenge - one of PowerPoint's built-in shapes will work fine - and setting the border to match one of the colours in your customer's logo makes everything look as if it was designed-in.  Make sure the logo has room to "breathe" in its holding shape.


...And don't ignore your own logo
It should go without saying that your own logo deserves the same respect as that of your customer.  But it's amazing how often I see text and graphics that overlap the presenter's own logo.  As a rule of thumb, leave space around any logo equal to the height of one of its principle elements.

Am I being precious here?  Quite possibly, but companies spend a lot of money on their brands, so they may well be equally precious.  You're there to get them to listen to you, not sit seething about what you've done to their logo.

In a Packed Programme Tonight...

Simon Cowell leans back, pokes his pen into the side of his face and leers, "So Tarquin, what are you going to do for us today?"

"Well Simon, first I'm going to tell you a bit about my training as a street dancer, then I'll be looking at the growth in street dancing over the last five years.  Then I'd like to explain why my dancing is different, unique and dynamic...

BZZZZZZZZZZZ!

The guy in the black tee shirt might always be impatient, but not everyone with a short attention span wears a black tee shirt.  If you draw this on a Venn diagram you'll uncover the possibility that the people in your audience are as attentive and patient as Alan Sugar at a cake-icing seminar.

I've already covered getting straight to the point in my post I've got something you're interested in, but first..., but today I want to mention my absolute pet hate.

It's called The Agenda.

Where do you think the audience is looking?

I'm sorry, I have no idea where the idea first developed that this was a Good Thing.  OK, I know that most of you are now muttering "tell 'em what you're going to tell em, tell 'em, then tell 'em what you've told 'em".  Fine, but you don't have to tell 'em the stages involved. 

"Hi Simon, I'm a Street Dancer."

"Oh good, we're really short of those at the moment."

You beat your competition by being better than them, not by making your presentation look hideously long and boring.

So stop describing the act and start bloody dancing.

PowerPoint: There IS a substitute for rehearsal

In my last post I talked about that embarrassing shuffle when you can't remember how many bullet points you put on that screen.  As promised, here's Daniel to show you how to get PowerPoint to warn you automatically when the last point has appeared.

Before you get too impressed with his technical brilliance, let me just point out that he used one of our free PowerPoint templates - and didn't notice that there's already an automatic slide marker in there.  So eagle-eyed viewers may spot two warnings that the slide is ending.

You just can't get the staff...