The Graphic Designer's Guide to Creative Marketing: Finding & Keeping Your Best Clients

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Summary: A practical, chatty, well-informed guide to selling design.
Review: Cooper-Bowen, much-published writer on the business of graphic design, usually addresses designers who are more comfortable with art than with profit-making. This book is no exception, but from that don't assume that the contents are either condescending or superficial. You should also not assume, if you already think of your practice as a sophisticated business, that this text will tell you nothing new. While we're not talking advanced economics here, the best advice Creative Marketing offers may be its frank assessment of when to rely on outside experts, and when to trust yourself. In plain language, the book tells you all the things you never learned in school about building a design business, with as much consideration for the artistic and personal rewards as the financial. Far from trying to force designers to fit a cold, big-business model, Cooper-Bowen's approach has everything to do with knowing exactly who you are. She encourages directness, individuality, and honesty as the best tools for long-term success. She presents experience-based (as opposed to theoretical) outlines for business plans, marketing plans, prospecting, and sales: explicit, 1-2-3 checklists structure a process most of us approach intuitively. That structure can help you stay objective as you define your own strengths, weakness, and goals-one of the hardest tasks of entrepreneuring. These nuts-and-bolts proceedures are illustrated by case studies of actual studios, showing Cooper-Bowen's ideas in action. The situations and personalities sound very familiar, and the solutions may elicit a few sighs of relief from those who've been struggling to remake themselves in some corporate mold. Creative Marketing gives great attention to personal and written communication, an area in which many visual communicators tend not to shine. Her clear guidelines for good letter, telephone, and personal presentation, backed by relevant and convincing examples, set realistic goals for effectively polishing your own image. Although I have to admit that, as an editor, I wish the author had given her own text-particularly her punctuation-another round of revision, the content itself is unusually realistic, and so precisely tailored to its audience as to be well worth the small investment for any small studio owner who suspects they could be doing better. I wish I'd read a book like this-and taken its advice-when I was struggling to make my freelance business fly. (from Nancy Bernard, Managing Editor of Critique Magazine.)

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Summary: The ABCs of marketing for every design professional
Review: Linda Cooper Bowen's guide to creative marketing is an essential step-by-step tool for any design professional -- at any level -- seeking to generate new business and improve their image. With such diverse and relevant topics as the role of the marketing manager, positioning your image, and successful promotion programs, she presents solid methods and easy ways to grow even an established design studio. I particularly appreciate the chapter on finding (and keeping) the best clients. It's the most important part of my own job, and I can sense the ways my firm will benefit from Cooper Bowen's expertise.