The Slickness Principle

Peter Seidman, Dissemination Program Director

The University of California recently had an open enrollment period for health insurance. I was deluged with information. I realized I was immersed in a dissemination question of special interest to me--just how slick do products have to be--really?

Nine health programs vied for my attention. My daily mail was inundated with SlickStuff from the vendors. Multicolored graphs. Beautiful pictures of parents and children and babies and my mom and all sorts of folks dressed in white. Much of this material was intended to deliver explicit information about the program. In my eyes, it failed. I was unable to understand the insurance programs from the piles of glossy materials. Then the university sent a chart comparing all the programs--one piece of plain paper, straightforward and easily accessible, laying out all the information I needed to choose health insurance.

So how slick do products have to be--really?

When I worked at the Illinois Department of Education some years ago, a colleague and I invented "the slickness principle." We defined slickness as the cosmetic component of a written product. Our principle held that a product's degree of slickness must be arrived at by weighing the number of copies you want to distribute against the available budget. Too often, not enough copies of something can be produced because too much of the budget was spent on slickness. One can't inform enough people when too much is spent informing too few.

I believe people want information that is useful, well-edited, affordable, and accessible--but not necessarily slick. In my twenty years of dissemination experience, operating according to this belief has gotten me in trouble with colleagues who want their stuff to look slick. However, evaluations of products and services disseminated in accordance with the slickness principle have been positive.

The slickness principle kicks in only when the glossy covers and multi-color printing consume resources needed to sell the material inexpensively and to market it widely.

Slick materials are attractive and compelling. So if the budget allows for slickness, terrific. However, slickness is a "nice-to-do," never a "must-do."

I recently asked subscribers to an electronic discussion group about dissemination issues in education (NCRVE's DISSMN8) how they weigh product affordability against gloss, color, and fancy graphics. I was surprised to find how many people disagreed with my view! Many noted that improved product design and glossiness increased sales, even with the 12 percent to 25 percent cost increase. People also remarked that customers equate looks with quality.

This feedback prompted me to refine the slickness principle. Clearly, it applies most strongly to materials sold sight unseen. For instance, at NCRVE's conference booth, the commercially published materials draw more attention than the Center-published, less slick products. To the public mind educated by advertising, "enticement" and "quality" are one, at least up to the point of sale.

For organizations with small, finite budgets, decisions about slickness must rest on how materials are sold. Those products sold sight unseen need minimum slickness, but marketing considerations dictate increased slickness for products sold through visual approaches.

There's much to be said on both sides of the debate. At NCRVE, we revisit the slickness issue with each dissemination initiative.

So what do you folks think? Just how slick do products have to be--really? Please join the discussion on DISSMN8, the online group for dissemination issues in education. (See the CyberSpace Update in this issue for instructions on how to join.) Or contact me at:

National Center for Research in Vocational Education
University of California at Berkeley
2030 Addison Street, Suite 500
Berkeley, CA 94720-1674
seidman@uclink.berkeley.edu
(800) (old phone deleted)
Fax: (510) 642-2124

Table of Contents | Next Article | Previous Article