The brochure has been around for a very long time, and they are used by so many different companies you can't help but see them all over the place. But the thing I've noticed about them is the surprising lack of variety a lot of companies employ when designing them.

This isn't really about the kind of graphics they use or word choice they put in them, but the actual design of the brochure itself.

I suspect that the reason for this lack of variation is derived from the fact that so few companies are varying things up, which ends up creating a kind of vicious cycle. Company A sees what company B is doing and figures company B must know what works and what doesn't, so company A does the same thing. Circumstances like this help to ensure that you don't get much variety in your advertising, and variety is what gets people looking at you.

So what can you do? The first step towards figuring that out is to talk to your printing company. They should have a wide variety of different styles to choose from to make your brochures different from what everyone else is doing.

This can be a more extreme change in form like using a pocket brochure, or simply varying up the way you fold your brochure. You might go for the different creative look, put different kind of information in than most people are doing. You can make your brochure like a mini catalog or make your brochure like a giant advertisement for a sale.

There are all sorts of different possibilities open to you, but first you need to know what you can do before you decide on what you're going to do.

Do some research into the field and see what you can find. I have a feeling if you start to look into a longer history of what companies have been doing, especially if you go outside of your particular industry, you'll start to see some very interesting designs that most companies don't pay attention to.

If you really want to get a good feel for everything open to you than do the needed research into everything you can. Why limit yourself to just what your printing company tells you about or just what other companies have been doing?

The reason why so many companies don't try a wide variety of brochure designs is because they don't know what they're able to do. A company not using a certain style of folding or certain look for their brochures has no bearing on whether or not it works. All it means is that that company chose not to look into what possibilities there were. Don't let apathy stop you from doing the needed research to make your brochures stand out from the pack.