Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

Signs, check. Stickers, check. Don’t forget brochures!

Nicely designed brochures are a key component of any election campaign’s print advertising strategy, but never more so than when a little-known candidate needs to catch up to the frontrunners. Take the Ron Paul campaign, for example…

The enthusiasm surrounding Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul has not faded, but grown since it first got going a few months ago. If you’ve checked out the political news section of Digg any day lately, you’ve seen that every second story is about the unconventional hero of embarrassed-by-the-current-administration Republicans the nation over.

It’s always interesting to watch an election campaign get more attention than it ever expected. In these rare instances, a campaign is able to mold itself around the demands of its voting audience, rather than just barreling through with a preordained plan of attack.

For example, the Ron Paul campaign has had the opportunity, as its star has risen, to focus on the issues that voters have selected as important. In the case of Dr. Paul’s campaign, “Hope for America,” the idea of a return to traditional, maybe even somewhat radical American values.

This is not the Republicanism of the 1940s and 50s, this is the Republicanism of the Founding Fathers: it’s tough, it’s individualistic, it loves freedom, and it loves America. Who wouldn’t want to hear more about a message like that?

To push the whole ‘return to a better time’ thing, the Ron Paul campaign has designed an advertising and branding strategy that focuses on a couple of nostalgia-inducing elements, such as:

• Good old honky-tonk, country western music, the only genre that Republicans can truly call their own.
• Print campaign designs that use simple lines and old-fashion, hugely serif font. The campaign designs sacrifice that ‘professional design’ look in favor of bringing to mind the straw hats and fluttering red and blue ribbons of old-timey politics.

But the best campaign design tip of all from the Ron Paul vote-gathering machine is their use of brochures. When you’re a little known candidate that’s suddenly drawing a lot of attention, you’re going to attract crowds that show up just to see what’s going on. In that idle moment of voyeurism lies a candidate’s opportunity to make a connection.

To make this connection at public events, it’s necessary to have volunteers spread throughout the edges of the crowd, handing out brochures to passers-by and to anyone that decides to stop for a moment and check out the crowd.

A well-designed brochure should have a candidate’s picture, logo, and slogan on the cover, while the inside should contain a good balance of captioned images and bullet-point information. It’s important to have copy laid out in such a way that readers can pick and choose what they want to read about, much as visitors to a website can.

Asking many readers to start at the beginning and read patiently to the end is asking too much. However, it is possible to hit both types of readers in a brochure, because there is enough room to experiment with different copywriting strategies. For example, the inside of a tri-fold brochure can be designed using a website-like display of piecemeal information, while the second and third pages of the outside can contain more detailed, paragraph-formatted copy that speaks to those who want in-depth plans and insights from their leaders.

However you choose to design you election campaign brochures, be sure to keep them in plentiful supply. This video from the Ron Paul campaign is a perfect example of how the availability of a brochure can win a voter. It’s also a perfect example of the only way a long-shot candidate can hope to travel from the back of the pack to the front. That is, one vote at a time.