I'm sure most businesses are going to have a point where they go back to previous marketing pushes in order to get a feel for what is going to work now. You can't really know what your customers will do in reaction to your marketing until you've seen it, which is why looking at previous marketing pushes becomes so helpful. Now you can get a good feel for what's going to work, and what you might need to improve on.



There are certain concerns and issues to be aware of though if you do decide to dredge up some older sample brochures or postcards or any other piece of marketing material. The farther back you go with the material the more important this becomes, as well.

Consider if the sample brochure you have is a full five or six years old. What kind of images did you use with it along with the word choice? How rooted was your brochure in the popular culture of the time, and what has changed in our society since then that might alter how a person would react to that exact same brochure?

Most marketing is obviously going to be designed to best appeal to the current customer base of a company. That customer base is going to be part of whatever movements are currently going on in the society, and their ideals and interests will reflect this.

Look at advertising from just ten years ago and you'll notice a number of differences between what worked then versus what is working now. If you aren't careful you might pick out some samples that did wonderful at the time, but that aren't really what your customers are going to have interest in now.

Does this then mean that anything older than three or four years needs to be thrown away because it won't be as useful today?

Not at all, you just need to understand what elements will be outdated and which ones are still going to be useful. The layout of the brochure is unlikely to be heavily linked with the time period, meaning you can still find different brochures that will be useful due to the way they combine images and words.

What you aren't going to be putting as much consideration to is the exact words or images themselves, because these are what are most likely to be outdated first, and be largely useless for figuring out your next marketing push now.

I don't want to direct anyone away from using previous samples of their marketing to get a better understanding of what will work today, because I think this is a good practice. You just have to be certain you know what was specific to the time the ad was first made, and what can be used for your marketing today.