subject: Back to the Old School – How Printed Business Cards are Still Indispensible [print this page] Back to the Old School How Printed Business Cards are Still Indispensible
Remember when everyone had printed business cards? Where every meeting descended into a kind of restrained bun fight, little squares of white cardboard fluttering around boardrooms, everyone trying to get their card pressed into the right hands? Well, those days are not over. They'll never be over. Business wants things to be done in a certain way and certain of those ways cannot be ignored or superseded, no matter how fast the modem, how quick the uplink or how excitingly jazzy the product.
There's an etiquette in business that can trace its history back hundreds of years. Printed business cards are emblematic of that etiquette and we all know that history and tradition have a much greater half life than modern trends. High aristocracy used to deliver calling cards prior to a visit: a habit picked up by wannabe high aristocracy if you had a calling card, the implication ran, you were somebody. That's where the idea of the business card comes from. It's not dissimilar now to the way it was then. People, who have printed business cards, in the business world, are somebody even if they're really nobody. Which is another way of saying that without a printed business card a person is, in certain business situations, invisible.
Visibility (and "memorability", or the property of being able to be remembered) is stupendously important in the business world. If you're not noticed, and not remembered, no-one does business with you and you go bust. Simple as that. In the right environment (generally the environments of meetings, presentations and trade fairs), the business card is the only acceptable way to become visible and to be remembered. Exactly like the calling cards propagated by the landed gentry of old. Printed business cards work by a) looking and feeling right for their environment, adding a touch of class to proceedings; and b) actually containing the information a person needs potential partners and clients to remembers, viz. his or her phone number and email address.
By having business cards printed, then, one is ensuring that one has the right tools to take on the business world where it really matters: in meetings, at presentations, in places where new business could and should be generated. Business cards are the only tool that fits when a person is conducting a business to business arrangement not a business-client relationship, which can be augmented with novelty promo items, but a relationship between one business and another, which can't. Anything other than printed business cards, in a business to business environment, looks frivolous. Business cards are all about choosing the right equipment for the right job like wearing a black tie when getting up to a dinner party.
There are all sorts of ways by which a person can get the name of his or her business, as well as his or her contact details, into the public domain. And that's precisely the point. Where there are all sorts of ways, there are choices and where there are choices, there are right and wrong ways to do the same thing. For the more reserved areas of one's business dealings meetings, presentations and so on there is only one right choice: printed business cards. Sometimes, the old ways are still the best.
