This Is a Mostly True Story About… Business Cards

No one has been murdered yet.

It is late in the morning. Roughly half a dozen sharply dressed vice presidents from investment banking firm Pierce & Pierce sit around a mahogany conference table, trading thinly veiled barbs and humblebrags disguised as small talk: the hot new restaurant where one of the lowly VPs improbably snagged a reservation, the status of an ongoing deal. Then the real measuring contest begins.

One of the vice presidents — a young, well-dressed man named Patrick Bateman — whips out a 2-by-3.5-inch white rectangle as if unsheathing a sword. “New card,” he says, beaming from behind his stylish Oliver Peoples glasses. “What do you think?”

“Whoa, very nice,” says one of the vice presidents admiringly. Another compliments Bateman on the color of the card. “That’s bone,” Bateman says proudly. “And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.”

但他的满意度不拉st long. “It is very cool, Bateman, but that’s nothing,” boasts another vice president, David Van Patten, slapping his own card down on the table. “Look at this.” The others ooh and ahh over the crisp, white cardstock and tasteful typeface as Van Patten turns to Bateman to ask what he thinks.

“很好，”他嘟the，他的不舒服开始在身体上表现出来。

“但等等，”戏弄另一个副总统，蒂莫西布莱斯。“你还没有看到没有。”价格在桌子上旋转它的属性时，价格设置了自己的卡：“凸起的刻字，苍白的云山，白色。”

经过now, the other vice presidents have been humbled. But Bateman, his face wracked with anxiety, can barely bring himself to speak. “Impressive,” he stammers. “Very nice. Let’s see Paul Allen’s card.” Allen produces the trump card: an elegant, ivory-colored rectangle with embossed letters.

“Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark,” Bateman thinks to himself. He holds up the card, but his hand starts to shake, and the card falls to the table.

“Is something wrong?” one of Bateman’s colleagues asks. “Patrick . . . you’resweating.”

Though thatscene— fromAmerican Psycho, starring Christian Bale as Bateman, the titular psycho — is now 20 years old, it remains arguably the most famous scene in American cinema to pay homage to the humble business card, those simple paper rectangles that convey, at a minimum, where we work, what we do, and how to reach us.

Few staples of corporate culture can boast the longevity and sheer durability of business cards, which, according to various historical accounts, date back five centuries. Remarkably, business cards have fended off one technological advance after another, from US Robotics’ Palm Pilot — a handheld personal communications device rolled out in the late ’90s that went the way of cassette tapes — to various would-be card-killer apps that launched to great fanfare, only to quietly fold just a few years later.

Indeed, at the start of this year, business cards seemed more popular than ever. AWall Street Journal story发表于1月份严重惊叹于他们的“非凡的持续力量”。来自DIY商业牌印刷公司MOO和Vistaprint的高管告诉论文，即他们的卡片印刷部门的销售增长强劲而且增长。

That was, of course, before the coronavirus pandemic began in earnest. As the virus began to spread globally, corporate offices worldwide shut down almost instantly, and face-to-face meetings, conferences, and other networking events vaporized overnight. The exchange of business cards also vanished like one of Patrick Bateman’s victims.

那么事件的这种剧烈转向是什么意思，然后是为了未来的名片？经过数百年的存在，众多失败的技术试图使他们过时，冠状病毒终于杀了谦逊的名片吗？

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One woman谁毫无疑问，希望它不会是沙克拉·棕色。

As a professional public speaker and founder ofSMB Strategic Media，它为中型和大型企业提供品牌和通信策略，棕色视图名片作为发电机的重要工具。当她在会议上发言时，布朗喜欢提供免费赠品 - 例如，关于她正在发言的主题的快速参考指南 - 换取与会者的名片。由于她说的很多组织不提供与会者名单，这有助于她自己建立自己。

And as a visual person, Brown says they help her make mental connections with the many people she meets. “I call myself a business-card savant,” she says. “I literally can meet someone and I associate what they look like and what they said to me with their business card, so when I come across their business card on my desk or the little envelope I keep things in, I know exactly who they are.”

But even as a die-hard business-card fan, she has her doubts about their future, owing to the lack of face-to-face meetings. And that’s not to mention the possible fear of germ spread from the physical contact a business-card exchange requires once meetings do start happening again. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is possible to contract the coronavirus by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching your mouth or nose, or possibly your eyes, though this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.)

Says Brown: “The business card is on life support.”

顾问、作家、企业家,和设计专业ssor Nathan Shedroff agrees that they are in trouble — “Given what's going on now, it's certainly a more reasonable, rational time to be questioning business cards than in the past,” he says — but he thinks they will pull through.

“I don't actually think business cards are going to go away,” saysShedroff, who teaches at the California College of the Arts. “They've survived this long miraculously already, in the face of technology trying to kill them and social convention trying to kill them. I think that's mostly because it's a nice ritual. It's this moment of gift-giving back and forth, hopefully reciprocally, that there's no replacement for.”

当中国人开始使用叫呼叫卡作为一种告诉他们计划访问的人来说，仪式追溯到中国的根源。在17世纪，欧洲的商人开发了贸易卡，担任其业务的广告。

In some cultures, the ritual of exchanging business cards is downright ceremonial. “The importance of this small object in modern Japanese society is such that I cannot help but compare it to the katana — the sword of ancient feudal warriors, once considered the soul of the samurai,” observed social anthropologist Maxime Polleri in a 2017 essay in今天人类学, noting that while a business card “does not empower its holder to behead those without one for a lack of respect,” not having one is considered unacceptable in the Japanese business world. So is exchanging cards haphazardly.

“Accepting the business card with both hands and taking the time to read what is engraved on it is a ritualized practice that is taken seriously in Japan. A business card is, in many ways, accepted as a gift, and implies reciprocity such that it is never simply received, but always exchanged. Not adhering to this pattern is also perceived as a major blunder in Japanese etiquette.”

Dominique Mielle, a former partner and senior portfolio manager at investment firm Canyon Partners, confirms this, having spent years doing business in Asia. She says that while forgetting to bring a business card in the U.S. and Europe is not a big deal, in Japan “it would be like if you refused to shake hands.”

The exchange of business cards in the U.S. is far less formal, of course — as are the cards themselves. Some are downright irreverent, particularly in the creative and technology fields.

Take the early business card of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. According to a 2015Economistarticle, the card read simply, “I’m CEO, bitch.” (Zuckerberg now carries around “a sensible, grown-up version,” according to the article.) Or those handed out by Lego employees (minifigures stamped with contact details), McDonald’s executives (shaped like an order of the fast-food chain’s famous French fries), or a Canadian divorce lawyer whose cards can be torn in half — one for each spouse, theEconomistarticle noted.

“A good business card has a lot of personality,” says Shedroff. “They give an opportunity for someone to express something about themselves or their company that doesn't come in just exchanging your contact info.”

A bad business card can do the opposite: Think background colors that clash with the type, tacky typefaces — or, perhaps worst of all, the square-shaped card. (When I once ran into a contact I hadn’t seen in a while, I asked him for his new card. “I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly as he handed me a square card, explaining that it wasn’t his idea.)

“我认为几乎所有时间都会在人们对人民努力工作的一个设计决定是使用一个明显厚的纸张，”Shedroff说。“这就像一个坚定的握手。这是立即的。它不会剥夺你的注意力，并成为自己的焦点，但它是一种很好的加强质量。“(An added bonus: “It's awesome in raffles,” he says. “If you go to a sandwich shop or a restaurant that has a ‘put your business card in for a free lunch’ [contest], often when people rummage around in those things, the thicker the card stock, the easier it is to grab.”)

But a good business card can also perform a far more important function, according to Edouard Robbes, partner and chief commercial officer at derivatives brokerage and capital introduction firm Thalēs Trading Solutions.

“这是一个留下第一印象，”他说。一个好的名片“对它有一定的厚度 - 同时保持相当简单，具有体贴的设计，反映了您的品牌。”在遇险的时候，你的品牌比以往任何时候都更重要。

“你的品牌是什么时候没有其他there,” he says. “Your brand is what will save you when you’re in a drawdown.”

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Do business cards really have that much power, though?当我提出一个关于他们的长寿时提出一个问题时，我得到了一系列的回应，其中许多伴侣持怀疑态度。

“If we are all going to be working from home and meeting on Zoom, why will we need them?” asked David Frankel, who describes himself in his bio as an entrepreneur and adviser.

David Snow，Privcap Media的合作伙伴，回应：“他们是吐司。那是领带。所有男性c套房都是如此。“

But the business card, as I learned, also has many passionate fans. There’s something about them that can be oddly emotional, whether stirring up memories of past jobs and colleagues or serving as bittersweet reminders of more optimistic times.

“我六个月前推出了一个新的业务，在关机前一个月或两个月，”萨姆威尔顾问，战略和通信公司的创始人亚当韦纳解释道。“我有一盒名片，自2月以来，我的咖啡桌/辅助台的远角已被安全地陷入困境。他们对我来说是一个可见的提醒，事情不会按计划进行，而且你必须适应。“

肯定捐款机构投资协会的沟通总监Karen Witham描述了她的感受，同时包装即将到来的举动，她偶尔偶尔遇到了旧名片的几个粘合剂。“看着他们就像找到旧信件一样，”她说。“有切实的东西有一种情感，感伤的依恋。我的务实方面认为他们应该也可能是rolodex和打字机的方式。但是，感到思想，有变形的东西很好。“

She’s not alone in her thinking. Adam Depelteau, senior product manager for business cards at Vistaprint, said in an email that while his company suffered a decline in demand for business-card printing services as the shutdowns began back in March, the company has since seen a rebound in demand, including some “new and reinvigorated use cases,” including for contact-tracing information.

“If we do have physical meetings again and we don’t want to shake hands, but we are sort of okay exchanging papers and documents, in a way business cards could be a replacement for the handshake,” says Mielle, the former Canyon partner.

To that end, Thalēs’ Robbes points out that business cards have survived prior pandemics, including the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. What’s more, he says business cards have a practical function that goes beyond the purely ceremonial. Robbes says the cards have begun evolving in an intriguing direction, one that “marries the old world with the new,” as he puts it.

一个例子：一些资产管理人员已经开始踩踏QR码 - 那些可以被扫描的黑白正方形将信息扫描到您的手机上 - 罗伯斯说。当潜在客户扫描卡时，它们被带到投资者门户的注册页面。在确认他们的BONA FIDE后，他们突然访问了一个复杂的安全网站，该网站具有经理的最新字母，演示文稿，风险报告和俯视书籍。

Meanwhile, investment professionals can see exactly which potential clients have accessed the portal, how much time they’ve spent there, and what documents they’ve viewed, allowing them to more efficiently target their marketing efforts — rather than employing the spray-and-pray approach of sending different emails to everyone they meet at an event, for example. And the use of the technology makes them look savvy to prospects.

“间接，如果您拥有QR码和该平台，它会发送您是技术驱动的消息，因此如果您是一个复杂的公司 - 并且许多对冲基金主张，并在流程中使用技术 - 您的消息通过为您的客户使用技术。所有这一切都在非常传统的名片上，“Robbes热烈。“这比帕特里克巴特曼的更好。”