Telling the Whole Story Behind a Company Name

For potential customers in Western New York who may not be familiar with Amherst Alarm, there is much more to the company than its name can ever suggest. Thus the sales brochure plays an important role in helping spread the Buffalo-based company’s message about its diverse portfolio.

SAMMY judges selected Amherst’s eight-page, full-color residential sales brochure, in part, for its neatly organized images of homeowners and family members interacting with technologies and services offered by the company. Among them were home theater, computer networking, security, telecommunications, home automation, lighting control and more.

“Our sales brochure helps convey to the customer all of the different things that we have the capability of doing for them,” says Tim Creenan, owner and founder of the company. “Sometimes people look at our name — Amherst Alarm — and they might not think we can do things beyond a basic security system. So we try to use the brochure as an example of the different types of systems we do and to try to show a little bit of the quality that we do with them.”

Amherst works with a graphics designer to produce its sales brochures; however, the concept remains simple and straightforward. The images of upper-scale residences do most of the “talking” while an emphasis is placed on word economy. 

“We don’t want to be writing an encyclopedia. It will be the very rare customer who would go into all that,” Creenan says. “We are about visual images and hot buttons we think people are going to be interested in, and getting the concepts down, not the specifics.”

Along with being used as a helpful tool on sales calls, Amerherst distributes its sales brochures at various home and garden shows, business networking events, as well as chamber of commerce programs.

Amherst doesn’t spend a lot time hashing out budgets and allocations where its sales brochure and other marketing collateral is concerned. Instead, Creenan takes a highly black-and-white approach to it all.

“The real answer is we are a zero budget company. If it make sense and it looks good to us, and we think it can make money for us, then we will do it,” he says. “That is the way we operate.”

Print | posted on Monday, June 13, 2011 12:44 PM