CASE STUDY

Open Road Publishing Sales Collateral

YEAR: 2025

INDUSTRY: Travel

LOCATION: Alaska/Canada

SCOPE: Media Kit, Business Cards, Tri-Fold Brochure

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Open Road Publishing is a travel publisher based in Alaska and Canada.

The publisher just released the third edition of The Open Road Guide, a hybrid business directory and travel guide that aims to bridge the gap between travelers and businesses along the Alaska Highway.

After the success of the third edition of the Guide, the sales team needed some sales materials from me before they headed out for the field. The sales from this period will allow the production team to design and prepare the second edition of the Guide.

The Sales Director assigned the scope of this project to include:

Business cards for each of the sales representatives
2025 Media Kit
Tri-fold brochure

THE CHALLENGE

Weak Brand Identity of Sales Collateral

Last year’s sales collateral was extremely disorganized — some of the written content and branding from a different publication somehow was on the sales collateral for Open Road Publishing. This led to lots of confusion amongst all of the Open Road Publishing staff and its customers. This project called for a unified and stronger brand identity of Open Road Publishing LLC to separate and distinguish it from its sister publications.

THE APPROACH

Follow the Branding Guidelines

I collaborated with the Director of Marketing & Production to seek out the Open Road Publishing Branding Guidelines. Next, I dug around the server where all of last year’s sales marketing collateral files are located and saved them in a more easily found place within the server. In order to still be able to refer to these old files, I just copied the files over to a new location.

These new files then have the paragraph styles and color swatches that are based on the Branding Guidelines. I then applied these Branding Guidelines to all of the sales marketing files that are part of the sales package.

THE RESULT

Better Visual Standardization

With the three sales items together, the sales package for the 2025 sales period look visually cohesive thanks to all of the designs following the Branding Guidelines typography and color usage. Later on, the sales team managed to onboard an additional 50 advertisers to be added into the 2nd edition of the Open Road Guide, which led to a profit of $500,000 to Open Road Publishing.