Business cards are exchanged in a meeting with four influential business partners. Everyone is practicing outdoing themselves. Patrick Bateman wants to impress with freshly printed business cards – and feels attacked in his self-worth, because his business card appears less stylish and perfectly formed than someone else’s. To make up for this defeat, he will commit murder.
It was one of the key scenes from the book “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis, which was published in 1991 and filmed in 2000 under the direction of Mary Harron.
On 549 pages of the novel, Ellis describes a nightmare of superficiality, portrays the first generation of yuppies – their addiction to distraction, their inner hollowness, their panic of being out.
The successful men define themselves through outward appearances, material achievements stimulate their ego. So much so that even the appearance of a business card leads to an act of violence.
In target-oriented marketing, printed matter reaches the emotional level more profoundly than digital media. It is this bizarre scene that illustrates how design options from haptic, optical and stylistic factors interact and leave a lasting impression.
Stylish business cards are a communicative exchange between two people. An exchange that, in the best case scenario, leaves good memories and in an even better case leads to an early contact. There should be no talk of murder;)