Marketing and design thoughts
Once every three to five weeks now for about three years I’ve been receiving these prize notifications from a Canadian magazine publisher. This month I may have won a new car, last month $32,500 and soon, any day now I’ll be getting that check for one million dollars in the mail.
What do I do? Every three to five weeks I dutifully go over every page and open every gold foil envelope wading over each and every product offering looking for those winning stickers to put beside my name in the hope that some Ed McMahon look alike will show up at my door and free me from my daily drudgery.
The point of this isn't so much that I have a better chance of being run down crossing the street than actually winning anything it's that with each mailing I receive I go through the various hoops supplied by the publisher and that really is the goal of the whole exercise. Or, I should say their goal. It goes back to what one of my design teachers brought up in class, payback. Me, the prospective customer, through a series of mailings is offered the chance to win stuff just by browsing their product listings. Where the design aspect comes into all of this is through how their mailings are handled.
In a typical mailing there will be some foil envelope or stickers with prize offerings woven through various products. This is one part of the design of the mailing, involvement. Get your visitor or your prospective customer involved at some level in the final piece was the rule preached to us. This action could be filling in a form, completing part of the design such as a geometric shape in their mind’s eye, or by putting stickers on a certificate for a million bucks. When the task is complete, providing it’s not too easy or too hard, for your viewer there’s a sense of accomplishment and the participant is far more likely to buy into your message and more importantly just plain buy.
From the marketing side of things this works well for this company as well. At least once a month they know I will send back my envelope full of stickers, keys, and certificates and their goal with this shotgun approach is that hopefully one of their products will ‘stick to the wall’ and I’ll spend my hard earned money helping to fund all those prizes that they give away. So in that regard they are persistent and consistent in getting their message out to their clients. This repetition helps keep their message well placed in my little consumer mind.
I do wish though that they would improve their market research. I keep getting product brochures for kids records and books, introductory computer skills books, and hits of the 1930’s and 40’s. I’m too old to have toddlers, I’m too young to know that there were any hits back in the 30’s and 40’s and I’ve been around computers for as long they’ve been around. That’s the last part of this little blurb, know you’re target audience. Who are you designing for, what do they like, and will they understand your message and be compelled by it to buy your product.
Too true. I'm struck by how little direct mail marketing has changed since the 70's. It's really just the same old formula, occasionally wrapped up in a new package. A bit discouraging to think that we humans can be so easily motivated with such tired, forumulaic approaches. There seems to be no room for the designer to innovate within such a closed world.
cd
Wait, you don't know what the hottest music was in 1930? Dang ;-)
You're so right though. Those things get me almost each time too. They at least get a read out of me, and heck... spam mail can't even claim that.