Winning at cards - business cards

Nation's Business, July, 1996 by Michael Barrier

We asked a few months back if any of you used out-of-the-ordinary business--cards that toll the recipient more about you than a conventional card would.

You sent us a gratifyingly large--and varied--collection of business cards, more than we can describe here. While perusing them, we realized just how attention-getting a clever business card can be.

One example is the card we got from Thomas J. Linnemeyer, senior vice president with Fort Wayne National Bank, in Fort Wayne, Ind. It looks like a tiny check, with Linnemeyer's name in the spot where an account holder's name would be on a regular check, and "100% Attention to Your Needs" is written in the space where the dollar amount would usually appear.

Other people use their business cards to send messages about their companies. We received a number of foldedover cards that list a company's services, or perhaps reproduce its mission statement, somewhere on the card.

And how about a business card that doesn't just toll you about a company but actually provides one of its services? We got such a card from Michael B. Smith, president of Topline, Inc., in Norcross, Ga. Topline is, as Smith says, "a sales and marketing firm that specializes in prepaid phone cards"--and his business card is just such a card, providing five minutes of long-distance calls.

Topline sells this type of card to other companies, too; Smith sent along photographic proofs for the five-minute cards he was making for two real-estate firms. Such cards are not cheap, of course--Topline sells 1,000 five-minute cards for $1,360, so you'd want to give them to serious customers--but they do make an impression. Better yet, since the recipient can buy additional time for the card beyond the initial five minutes, there's a good chance that your name and phone number will always be in your customer's wallet.

(Still better, when someone adds calling time to the business card you've given them, you get a 20 percent commission; Smith tells us that he just got a $1 commission himself when someone added time to one of his business cards.)

Our only problem with these business cards is a severely practical one: We tend to punch holes in the business cards we want to save so we can insert them in our Rolodex, and it's hard to do that with a phone card that is made of stiff plastic like a credit card.

Other companies use their business cards to set a tone--to say, usually, "We don't take ourselves too seriously." As we write, we're looking at a set of cards from Logo Tech, a Tucson, Ariz., company that converts sports teams' logos and other designs to computer language so they can be embroidered automatically on things like sweat shirts and caps. The cards identify members of the staff as, variously, "The Logo Khan," "The Logo God," "The Digitizing Queen," and so on. Sounds like a fun place to work.

We also got a note from Alora Dunlap, whose card identifies her as the "Administrative Czar' for Sophisticated Circuits, a Bothell, Wash., developer and manufacturer of Macintosh computers. "As you can see," she wrote, "I am more than an office administrator. If there is a problem, everyone runs to me for the answer. Control is good!"

Gulp! We were going to suggest to Alora that "Administrative Empress" might be an even better title, but, on second thought, "Administrative Czar" may be just about right.

One of our favorite cards is not, strictly speaking, a business card. It comes from Denise Haywood, daughter of a candidate for the Texas state Senate, and it identifies her as exactly that: "Daughter."

The possibilities hero are thought-provoking. Family units are, after all, small businesses of a sort, and everyone in them has responsibilities that usually can be summed up in one or two titles, like "Father," "Mother," "Husband," and "Wife." If everyone in the family carried business cards of that kind, would it make them more aware of their roles? And what if misbehavior entailed a demotion of sorts--from, say, "Son" or "Daughter" to "Spoiled Brat" or "Icky Teenager"?

That's a good place to stop. You know what would happen: Such cards would become status symbols among the playground set and the mall rats. Your only recourse would be to start handing out cards designating the recipient "Perfect Child." You can bet they'd never show those cards to their friends.