Interview by Pamela Oldham

Deliver® recently caught up with Dr. Samir Husni, the University of Mississippi professor and lecturer widely known as “Mr. Magazine,” to discuss the future of branded print marketing communications.

In the second of our two-part interview, Husni talks about what the future holds for catalog marketers and what custom publications must do to remain relevant in an increasingly digital and eco-conscious world. (Read the first part of the interview here.)

DELIVER: What’s ahead for catalog retailers?

SAMIR HUSNI: We’re going back to the psychological aspect of “wishing.” The whole mentality has changed from something that is nice to have to something that is needed. Even when you look in the catalogs and see the designs and then weigh the offers, they’re now based on need as well as want and desire.

DELIVER: Is catalog messaging changing?

HUSNI: Some of them are trying to be more magazine-ish. The Avon brochure, for instance. They’re introducing a little article here and there, like Lands’ End. They’re trying to be part of that experience, trying to create the experience so it’s not like they’re just selling. Instead, they’re [saying], “We’re giving you advice, we’re giving you tips, and we’re helping you.” It’s putting a human touch on those brochures. If there is one major change that is taking place right now it’s that we are humanizing catalogs. It’s not, “Here’s A, B and C.” We’re now telling you, “Here’s A, B and C — and B might look much better on you.” The more we humanize catalogs, the more we add to the brand experience, the more we add to that sense of community and sense of belonging.

DELIVER: How can catalogs be more relevant?

HUSNI: What we want to see even more than just relevancy is the catalog must become like a magazine. I don’t want somebody sending me a message on every page that says, “Go to the Web. Go here. Look here. See how this looks, here, there and there.” I want my brand experience within that catalog to remain there until I want to order something. Then send me to the Web [to buy].

DELIVER: You’ve talked about the comeback of the print catalog. What kind of environmental challenges does this highlight?

HUSNI: We need better education because there’s this myth that catalogs, that paper, all that stuff is hurting the environment. What about the batteries that we are using [to run] our laptops? What about the electricity that we are spending? At least magazines and catalogs can be recycled. I have five laptops sitting at home. What do I do with these things? It’s good to care about the environment, but we need to educate our public rather than just say, “We’re going green.” And why should we be the only ones going green? A laptop is not essentially the best environmental answer to the catalog.

DELIVER: Are you seeing any particularly exciting innovations in printed corporate marketing communications?

HUSNI: Now is the time for innovation. To me, the first step in innovation is focus. Give me something that will stop me in my tracks. When I see my name on every ad or I see something in the ad that specifically talks about Samir, that stops me. Technology is enabling ideas. We can easily afford to create five design covers of the same magazine now, based on different demographics and psychographics of five different audiences. We can experiment with new textures. There’s a book that came out in Germany, for instance, that is made of edible paper. We have chips we can put into magazines that talk to you. The problem is a lot of us are still using whatever innovation comes out in the marketplace for the sake of innovation, and that’s the biggest mistake we can make. I want to create and come up with innovative ideas that make my product a must-have rather than a nice-to-have.

DELIVER: Any other final thoughts?

HUSNI: One of the things that I really believe we’re going to be seeing more and more in the future is putting all that data we have to better use. We have to create this feeling that we are visiting with you, that I am your best friend and you can’t wait to come see me so we can talk about things that interest you and that I have the answers for. That’s why content is so important. We have to be in the business of selling content because content is our conversation with our audience, and we have to be the ones who start that conversation. The customer has all the questions. [They’re saying], “I’m waiting for you to start the conversation with me and start answering my questions.” Any piece of media that comes to me that does not start the conversation is one I consider to be a failure.

Interview by Pamela Oldham

Want to sell more products and services through your print pieces? Maybe you should stop trying so hard to simply sell.

That’s the advice of Dr. Samir Husni, one of the nation’s most highly regarded authorities on modern magazine publishing. Known widely as “Mr. Magazine,” Husni serves as director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism, where he is also professor and Hederman Lecturer. He maintains his own Web site, authors an annual guide to new magazines and conducts regular interviews around the country about contemporary publishing.

Deliver® recently talked with Mr. Magazine about the direction of custom magazines, catalogs and other printed communications vital to the marketing mix. In the first part of a two-part interview, Dr. Husni urges CMOs to view print marketing as a matchmaking function, one in which their publications focus less on the hard sell and more on fashioning a unique, relevant and seductive experience. Read the second half of the interview with Dr. Husni here.

DELIVER: What role do branded communications, especially magazines, play in helping companies meet marketing objectives?

SAMIR HUSNI: One of the latest trends today is what we refer to as the “grand experience,” that engagement process we used to have in the good old days — before we surrendered that time to the Internet and computers, when people received a magazine and immediately felt they were a part of a community. The magazine in hand is an experience that you enjoy as you flip the pages, as you engage with that magazine and as you lose yourself in reading it. If the audience is clearly identified and the relationship between the audience and the brand is the best matchmaking effort, then we have a very successful effort. Every time somebody loses themselves within that experience, you know they become addicted to it — and therefore will become users of that brand.

DELIVER: Are there companies that produce quality branded communications?

HUSNI: There are, but it depends on the magazine and whom it aims to target. A good example is Mine, the customized magazine created by Time Inc. and Lexus. Mine offers a mix of articles that reflect my lifestyle. The minimal amount of ads within the magazine show me the new Lexus RX, but are customized to speak to me, without being intrusive. I believe that good journalism helps market good products. When you have branded content, you must know who your audience is and try to create a relationship with that audience. Take some time to study the lifestyle and values of your audience. I always say that we’re no longer in the business of counting numbers. Now we’re in the business of finding customers who count.

DELIVER: What’s the role of “customer” publishing in the marketing mix today?

HUSNI: We’re lagging behind Europe and other countries in custom publishing. I am glad you mentioned customer publishing because I have been one of those people who have been trying to push the American custom publishing industry to add the “E-R” to custom publishing. “Custom publishing” is a good term, but “customer publishing” is an even better choice because now, we are laser-targeting the product to that specific customer. matchmaking

Marketers are in the business of reaching a very specific audience. Who else [but custom publishers] can create something that is specifically targeted to the needs, wants and desires of that customer? That’s why I use the word “matchmaking.” Who is better than a custom publisher at being a matchmaker between the brand and the user of the brand?

DELIVER: In your view, what is the state of catalog marketing? Should marketers think of catalogs as similar to magazines?

HUSNI:Anything you hold in your hands and can view with your eyes evokes a different response in your brain than just looking at your computer screen or touching something. It’s the combination of our sight and sense of touch — those two senses create a completely different reaction that makes us view things differently. So that’s why catalogs are making a comeback. They declined when everybody said, “Oh, let’s put all the catalogs online.” But more and more companies discovered that the more [print] catalogs they cut, the less traffic they pulled to their online sales sites. So they are now using the catalog as the means to put the brand in your hands and then [to get you to] go online to order. Human beings love that sense of ownership. We want to hold something in our hand and say, “This is my Lands’ End catalog,” “This is my Cosmopolitan magazine.” You can never say anything on the Web is yours, including your own Web site. We want the sense of calling it ours; this is mine … showing it, displaying it on our coffee table, throwing it in the recycling bin; doing whatever you want to do with it because it’s yours.

DELIVER: You spoke about the need to engage customers so they immerse themselves in the brand and lose themselves in the pages of a magazine. Is that also true of catalogs?

HUSNI: It’s a shopping experience. I’m one of those few people who do not actually believe in this myth of a separation of “church” (editorial content) and “state” (advertising goals) in magazines. When people pick up a magazine, they are looking as much at the ads as they are looking at the articles. So when it comes to a catalog, it’s one big shopping experience. It’s like you are strolling along Fifth Avenue and you are seeing all these products in front of you. You’re flipping pages until something stops you. Then you either go online to order it or you take a second look or a third look or you show it to somebody. That doesn’t happen on the Internet as easily. [With a print catalog], you can flip through and go back and forth easily without having to squeeze your eyes or tilt your head back to see the screen better or any of that. So it’s not only psychological; it’s physical, too.

By Pamela Oldham

When Jessica Paindiris became marketing director for industry-leading Massey Knakal Realty Services, she found herself taking on a customer communications problem that wasn’t just strategic — but frustratingly systemic, too.

“We had more than 75 brokers among three offices in the New York City metro area, each using three or more vendors for direct mail printing and distribution, all doing their own thing. Nothing was consistent,” says Paindiris, who joined New York’s top building sales firm two years ago.

The bookkeeping nightmare was just as bad, according to Paindiris: “Our accounting department had to chase down back-up for hundreds of invoices.”

DIY Direct Mail

To increase efficiency, Paindiris turned to a solution whose popularity has rapidly spread among many corporate marketers: a Web-to-print program, essentially an online and automated prepress process. Aided by MSP, a direct mail marketing company in Freedom, Pa., she installed a program that allowed each broker to create his or her own Web-to-print direct mail pieces tailored to specific clients.

Each broker gets a customizable online template. The template can be changed according to corporate standards, guidelines and size of the piece. From there, brokers choose targets from either their own mailing list or from a preloaded database.

Efficient and Convenient

Once approved, the pieces are printed and in the mail within two business days — a far cry from the several days that it often took for traditional print programs to get rolling. “Previously, they spent hours and hours just labeling postcards,” recalls Paindiris. “Efficiency has definitely improved.”

Automated invoice and payment features in the program add to its convenience, says Christopher Wright, director of sales and marketing at MSP. “Time is money,” he says. “MK corporate personnel were spending dozens of hours chasing down invoices and receipts, and that cost has been eliminated because the process has been completely automated.”

Enterprise-wide Web-to-print solutions allow marketers flexibility while also remaining consistent with corporate branding and messaging, Wright explains. And, the savings can be significant, he says. “You’re printing on demand, printing as it’s needed. There’s no waste, no obsolescence, no hidden costs.”

Saving on Time, Money and Storage Space

The savings on design fees and other labor costs eliminated by the Web-to-print effort can be significant for a major company like Massey Knakal — whose brokers mail between 50,000 and 75,000 pieces a month. Wright and his clients are reluctant to provide specifics on the savings they’ve realized, wary of tipping competitors. However, Wright tries to sum it up by repeating an old adage:

“Time,” Wright says, “is money.”

Storage space is money too, another concern minimized by Web-to-print. In the past, experts note, companies that managed centralized direct mail and printing programs for multiple operating units — including franchises and individual sales representatives — commonly printed large numbers of “shell” materials. These materials sat in a warehouse waiting for future customization and distribution.

But the expected cost savings was quickly negated by the expense of rapid inventory obsolescence, program inflexibility and service issues. The long lead times required for even modest customization led users to abandon corporate and franchise policies and take their printing elsewhere — especially those in intensely competitive environments where speed is as valued as cash.

Direct mail messages that focus on a few quality contacts can take social network connections to the next level.

By Steve Tingiris

Forget the sales funnel. This traditional marketing approach of getting your message in front of thousands of people to net a handful of customers isn’t working the way it used to.

Consumers today are inundated with marketing messages — and they’re not paying attention to most of them. How can they? It’s gotten so easy to communicate electronically that most can’t keep up with the number of daily e-mails, text messages, instant messages, friend requests, tweets and all the other updates they get.

So the key is to identify the few people who will have the greatest impact on your business and connect with them on a one-to-one basis. Problem is, most marketing communications are still generated by databases and, all too often, electronic messages get lost in the crowd or aren’t as personal as the social media channels to which consumers have become accustomed.

We’re changing that at Enthusem by putting a digital twist on classic greeting cards. With our technology, marketers can send a handcrafted greeting card from the Web with a personalized message and a link back to their online world. They can include a digital component like a URL or a pickup code, which recipients can type in online to view a custom video or read an extended note, among other things. Plus the cards arrive in translucent envelopes that catch the eye of the recipient more than an e-mail or e-card might.

We’ve used the approach to successfully market our own company. When Marc Fors, our co-founder, saw the potential for collaborating with a data storage site, he mailed the company’s CEO a card featuring a photo of the company’s lobby, a message suggesting a partnership and a link to more information online. We signed an agreement 30 days later. That was a $2 marketing campaign.

You can see why salespeople love this technology — they can connect with prospects, customers, supporters, friends or anyone else in a way that is personal, engaging and extremely memorable. Even simple business thank-you cards can link your best customers to online product literature — without spending the time to hand-write every note. It’s traditional style with almost infinite possibilities.

Whether you’re making the connections online with social networking or in person, if you can capture a postal address, you can use mail to see results. The secret is in identifying those few people with the power to have the greatest impact on your business, then communicating with them in unexpected ways. A custom-created greeting card with a personal note and a link to more information online is one of the best ways to do that today.

-Steve Tingiris is founder and chief executive officer of Enthusem.com.

With cash-crunched consumers hunting for bargains, Valpak is capitalizing on the explosion in coupon usage.

By Sandra Bechwith

After nearly two decades in decline, the coupon is back. Last year marked the first time in 17 years that consumers used more coupons than they did the previous year. An estimated 3.3 billion consumer packaged goods coupons were redeemed in 2009 — a whopping 27-percent increase over the 2.6 billion redeemed in 2008, according to Inmar, a coupon processing company.

It’s no surprise that the uptick coincided with news of the U.S. financial crisis. But despite the tight economy, marketers invested heavily in coupons, boosting the number available to the highest level in more than 30 years.

“Brands saw coupons as a key to maintaining brand strength,” says Matthew Tilley, marketing director for Inmar’s promotion services division. “If they reduced their promotional presence, they stood to lose sales to lower-priced competitors and store brands, so they doubled down hoping to create brand loyalty once the economic dust settled.”

One of the companies that benefitted from the coupon surge was Valpak, which gives local and national advertisers an affordable way to reach targeted audiences with mailed coupons.

But unlike other brands, Valpak’s challenge wasn’t so much awareness. (Its signature blue envelopes loaded with coupons and special offers already were hitting 42 million homes nationwide each month.) It was to remain relevant to coupon clippers, including those who prefer digital delivery.

“If consumers receive a packet of coupons that aren’t relevant to them, it won’t be long before they stop opening our envelope,” says Greg Bicket, president of Cox Target Media, Valpak’s owner.

But for to day ’s consumer, remaining relevant also means making coupons available where people are looking for them. For some, that’s online. To keep up with changing consumer wants and needs, Valpak began syndicating its coupons to 150 online locations. Coupon links on those sites bring shoppers back to Valpak.com, where the Largo, Fla. –based company tracks which coupons are printed or viewed and provides the information to advertisers. Valpak also recently began offering mobile applications for smart phone users seeking coupons based on their location.

In an effort to showcase the company’s ability to stay current with trends, it collaborated in March with a popular daytime talk show for a high-profile promotion involving augmented reality. Valpak house holds received an envelope with an icon that triggered an augmented reality experience on the show ’s Web site when the icon was held up to a webcam. The promotion required users to first register online for a chance to w in a trip to a show taping, then use their augmented reality icon to determine if they won a cookbook. The icon also triggered a thank- you video from the show ’s host.

“Early research suggests that consumers are going to include augmented reality experiences in their product purchase research, and we’re in an excellent position to help make that possible by adding the icons to our paper coupons,” Bicket says.

Even though Valpak is dabbling in new distribution methods, the company maintains a stern commitment to print. “More than 90 percent of our business comes through direct mail, and we don’t expect that to change anytime soon,” Bicket says.

To that end, the company has invested $200 million in a 10-acre, state-of-the-art printing and mailing facility that runs 24 hours a day, six days a week.

Valpak franchisees diligently work with advertisers to create an effective offer to be printed on an insert that will join, on average, 40 others in the blue envelope. Using data compiled by the company’s in-house research department, franchisees advise clients on appropriate reach, recommended frequency and effective offers.

“I’ve been with franchisees when they have turned down advertisers who either aren’t a good fit or aren’t able to make the right offer to consumers,” Bicket says. “It’s one way franchisees help keep what’s in our envelopes relevant.”

Bicket adds that there are a lot of ways to jazz up what is already a very effective four-color coupon that is well established with the public.

“We can give it new dimensions that sustain interest and relevance to multiple generations,” he says. “While one might prefer a traditional print coupon, another might be interested in more high- tech features.”

Recognizing that people interact with media in different ways, Valpak expects to see a growth in digital options to as much as 10 percent of its business in five years. “Even so, we see a long future in print,” says Bicket, “because when our advertisers combine digital with print, they get better results.”

It’s no longer good enough to respond to leads in a day or even hours — response time is now measured in minutes.

By David Rosendahl

How much does a quick turnaround on leads really impact ROI? A comprehensive lead response management survey from MIT and InsideSales.com tells us that the odds are 21 times greater of qualifying a Web-based lead if it’s responded to in five minutes vs. 30 minutes.

But it’s not just about quickly getting a prospective customer to pick up the phone while his or her interest is piqued. You also have to engage the individual in a meaningful and relevant discussion within moments of browsing your Web site, landing pages or microsites.

Thanks to the latest real-time data software, the information you need to do just that is at your fingertips. Every generated lead can include additional details about the individual’s interest, the pages they’ve previously viewed and the marketing that drove them online, such as a direct mail piece with a personalized URL.

The ability to provide a fast and meaningful response is only one benefit of the new technology. Monitoring data in real time also allows you to test, track and tweak performance as it unfolds. Rather than waiting until the end of the campaign, you can spot trouble areas and make improvements on the fly.

As an added bonus — because some elements of a realtime, cross-media campaign can be modified as they unfold — things don’t have to be “perfect” in order to launch a campaign. This lets marketing managers create campaigns that become more streamlined and increasingly more effective as time goes on.

Real-time data helped us convert prospects to customers at a recent event. We held a gathering for our user community, friends and the press at the PRINT 09 trade show in Chicago. Two hours before it began, our marketing team reviewed the latest RSVP figures — pulled in real time from the campaign dashboard. Noting the frantic nature of the show, we decided to send a text message to all who had responded, reminding them of the event, location and time.

This approach worked extremely well for us, as the event yielded more new clients than any previous year. In this economic environment, taking advantage of real-time data proved instrumental in maximizing our ROI, and it can do the same for you.

David Rosendahl is co-founder and executive vice president of client services for MindFireInc. (mindfireinc.com), which links offline marketing channels with the Internet.

We reveal four marketing trends likely to get hotter in 2010 – and show you how they can work for brands of any size.

By Anne Stuart

With the direct marketing industry in the grip of a series of upheavals, from the digital revolution to the economic meltdown, figuring out what’s coming next is becoming progressively more difficult. Creating effective strategies based on these expectations is the toughest part of all.

And so, faced with one new challenge after another — from increasing costs for production and materials to rising environmental concerns among consumers — marketers have intensified their push to get ahead of the industry curve. This has led to a massive scramble to determine where the most significant industry trends for next year will emerge.

To help, Deliver® sat down with experts from around the country to attempt to divine what’s in store for direct in 2010. While a number of potential trends were discussed, there were four key areas — targeting, measurement, channel integration and prospecting among baby boomers — that kept coming up as likely hot spots for growth and innovation.

As a result, we decided to take a closer look at these four fields and what possibilities they hold for marketers in the coming year.

1. Targeting

If there’s a one-word formula for marketing success next year, it’s “precision,” industry leaders say. Traditionally, of course, the trend has been toward amassing as much information as possible about prospect and customer groups, then bombarding them with offers. But that approach is no longer viable.

According to a recent Winterberry Group report, the organizations struggling hardest are those that have depended most heavily on “batch blast”–style mailings — that is, using the mail as a saturation tool with little or no regard for rich personalization or the particular needs of the individual recipient.

Liz Miller, CMO Council vice president of programs and operations, sums up the trend: “We’re moving away from saying, ‘I want to connect with women who are 34 to 54’ to ‘I want to connect with that particular woman.’”

Such customized approaches are already possible, but to date, have typically included only recipients’ names and, in some cases, their locations. But, Miller says, continuing advancements in database management and variable data printing (VDP) have industry experts predicting more robust personalization techniques in 2010.

Backroads, an active- and adventure-travel company, is already learning the value of tightly focused personalization, especially for generating repeat business. The organization uses automated marketing engine technology from Nimblefish to mail thousands of postcards to past customers that contain not only personalized messages but also photos of regions recipients have traveled to in the past. “The message might say, ‘Barbara, remember Yellowstone in May 2002? Have another memorable trip — and here are three options,’” says Massimo Prioreschi, vice president of sales and marketing for the Berkeley, Calif., company.

Miller says these kinds of highly tailored mail pieces offer a good glimpse of the direction that targeting will continue to take in 2010. “That’s going beyond just putting one person’s name on a piece of paper,” she adds. “It’s saying, ‘We want to give you everything that’s relevant to you right now.’”

2. Measurement/Analysis

While the need to tally ROI has always been essential to marketers, they are more pressed to prove that their campaigns are impacting consumers and generating revenue.

Experts predict that, as measurement tools become more precise, how brands measure the return on their investment is likely to become more complicated. They will have to pay attention to a broader range of data, and companies will have to work even harder to make sure that other parts of the organization operate in conjunction with the marketing department.

The CMO Council’s Miller recommends organizations extend their ROI measurement to the entire marketing supply chain. “Don’t focus on the return at the expense of managing investment costs,” she says. “Map, track, measure and put a dollar amount on everything you do.”

She adds that marketers also will have to improve customer experience, mostly by learning to better mine data. Businesses like Harrah’s Entertainment — owners of 54 casino and hotel properties worldwide — know the value of the detailed data their programs generate. The company’s mail-driven loyalty program, for instance, has allowed its marketers to collect and analyze data on how often program participants visit their properties, how much members contribute to overall gaming revenue and what games of chance they prefer, among other things.

In-depth analysis of members’ behavior lets Harrah’s construct more effective messages, says David Norton, senior vice president and CMO for Harrah’s. “If we know a player has been to past slot tournaments, we’ll make sure he or she gets invited to the next one,” he adds. “If they’ve never come to a mid-week event, we exclude them from mailings about mid-week events because, obviously, they’re not going to respond.”

3. Integration

In 2010, improved integration of channels, such as e-mail, direct mail, billboards and TV, will become more of a focal point for even the most reluctant marketers. “That’s always been a goal, but the economy has made it imperative,” CMO Council’s Miller says.

And even though the past two years brought plenty of dire speculation about — and even premature eulogies for — the future of print marketing, the people who keep an eye on these things insist that traditional channels like direct mail will continue to earn their place at the marketing table in 2010.

“The favorite thing to say in 2008 was that, in 2009, print would be dead because everybody was going to e-mail,” Miller recalls. “That didn’t happen. Actually, both modes of communication took a hit during the past year.”

For that reason, most marketers have found that online channels demonstrate greater value as a complement to direct mail applications, reinforcing the value of integrated programs, according to the Winterberry Group.

Backroads’ Prioreschi says that postcard mailers his company sends also drive recipients to a personalized Web site with several highly targeted offers. “If someone went to Yellowstone, Alaska and Glacier National Park, we know there’s a definite pattern there indicating he or she is a mountain wilderness person,” he adds. Thus, the personalized site might include offers for upcoming trips to the Canadian Rockies or Himalayas, complete with slideshows and videos.

Prioreschi says integration is working well. During one campaign, sales were 50 percent higher among people who received a postcard and clicked through to a personalized site than those who just visited the site on their own.

4. Prospecting

Since World War II, the 18 to 25 age range has been the sweet spot of American marketing. “There was a good reason for that,” says Dr. Ken Dychtwald, founder and CEO of Age Wave, a San Francisco research and consulting firm that specializes in helping companies market to older customers. “Young people historically represented an area of growth because of their willingness to try new things. They were still forming their brand preferences. The idea was that if you captured their hearts at that stage, you had them for life.”

And, of course, the postwar baby boom filled the sweet spot with tens of millions of potential young targets for marketers. Although the baby boomers have since aged, marketing experts say that, in many ways, they still represent a marketing sweet spot for industry innovators. Consequently, many in the industry are predicting a renewed focus on baby boomers in the coming year.

“People should be swooning over the baby boomers as they move out of youth and into middle age,” Dychtwald says. “This is an age group that has traditionally been sidelined, but we’re going to see growth in sectors catering to them.

“Reinvention is normal for this generation,” Dychtwald continues.
“They change careers many more times than their moms and dads did.
They’re willing to try new things. So if you think you can rest on your laurels — if you think you’ve got them for life — you’re wrong. Today, everybody at every stage of life is open to marketing.”

In courting boomers, he says, marketers also are reacting to another growing trend in marketing: the end of brand loyalty and the return to brand experimentation. People are more willing to try new brands than ever — and those over 50 years old are particularly open to these new messages, Dychtwald says. “They’re more likely than any other group to read and respond to catalogs and direct mail pieces,” he adds, citing research from the Direct Marketing Association. “They enjoy reading a good catalog and leafing through their mail looking for deals. Good pitches attract their attention. It’s a mistake not to take direct marketing seriously for mature populations — and the time to start is right now.”

Of course, the same could also be said about any of the other trends marketers are expecting to get bigger in 2010.

The Xerox 1:1 Lab shows how highly personalized marketing messages are leaving imprints on consumers.

By Chantal Tode

Sure, plenty of direct marketers and print ad specialists will talk a good game about how personalization and other newer techniques can lift your bottom line.
But at Xerox, the experts have developed a mail-marketing program — known as the “1:1 Lab” — that’s designed to help them back up the boasts.

“We’ve told the story a lot about how response rates and return on investment improve with the use of full-color printing and relevant data,” says Shelley Sweeney, vice president and general manager of the service bureau and direct marketing sector for Xerox’s graphics communications business. “But we really needed to prove it to people in a way that gives a true A/B comparison.”

Most high-level corporate marketers understand that personalization works. However, many brands fail to take advantage of the power of mail personalization because they don’t or can’t gather the consumer information critical to such precise targeting, Sweeney says. “Customer data is by far the most important thing to a successful direct mail campaign, which is what we are trying to prove in the lab,” she adds. “Most marketers have the data, but it might be in three or four different places.”

Without a certain depth of information about customers, such as when they last made purchases, marketers will find it impossible to create truly relevant messages. In fact, Sweeney says, Xerox regularly turns away candidates for the 1:1 Lab because the marketing department can’t compile customer data from the disparate departments.

Despite its name, the 1:1 Lab isn’t a physical place, although it was indeed born in a high-tech Xerox printing facility in Canada some years ago. Since expanding beyond the Canadian marketplace, the effort has become a “virtual” program in which Xerox and its partners around the globe blend their expertise with the company’s latest technology to underscore how personalization increases a message’s relevance to mail recipients.

Under the program, Xerox fits select clients’ existing mail campaigns with a variety of variable data printing (VDP) solutions. The marketing offer and creative are largely the same as the original mailer, with the biggest difference being the increased personalization of the 1:1 version. The Xerox Graphic Communications customer and direct marketing provider then print and mail out the revamped pieces, at no cost to the client, to measure how well the new mailers do as compared to the less-personalized versions. The hope at Xerox, of course, is that successful tests of its mailers will encourage client marketers to use a customized direct mail approach (and Xerox’s expertise) in full-blown direct mail campaigns.

Xerox completes about 10 tests a year in the 1:1 Lab, including several with well-known national brands. Typically, Xerox picks test candidates with robust customer data that are willing to publish any results. Once it chooses a candidate, Xerox teams up with that marketer’s production partner and any other strategic partners involved with the campaign.

Getting results

So far, many of Xerox’s clients are citing increased response to the personalized mailers. For instance, one recent test involved a 529 college savings fund. Dissatisfied with contribution levels, the fund administrators worked with the 1:1 Lab to revise a critical direct mail piece. The new version included graphics that projected how much money the targeted fund participant could save up by the time his or her child was ready for college. Additional graphs showed how greater contributions could boost the growth of the target’s account. Recipients of the personalized mailer upped their contributions levels at a higher rate than those receiving the traditional letter with no graphs, according to Sweeney.

“It really is a way, with no effort on the part of the end client, to be able to prove how successful direct marketing can be when it is not just spray and pray,” Sweeney says.

Content is king

Of course, there are many other marketers who do collect a wealth of vital data, and theirs are the brands that benefit most from the Lab. Consider, for instance, Ford Motor Co. The carmaker was using basic personalization — such as customers’ first names and the vehicles that they owned — in a recent direct mail campaign to promote extended service contracts. However, when response rates topped out at about 2.5 percent, the company looked for other ways to maximize ROI on the mailers. “We were doing a mediocre job of giving customers a reason to respond,” admits Mark Bardusch, Ford’s national sales and marketing manager of extended service business.

Ford’s production provider for the campaign, Budco, recommended the 1:1 Lab.
As a first step to reworking the mailer, Bardusch and Budco marketers pulled together an abundance of customer data from various departments, including vehicle type, length of ownership, address, age, income and gender.

“By combining the different sets of data and looking really hard at how we could connect the data with the messaging, we were able to build messages that speak to the reasons why having an extended service contract is important to different customers,” says Jeff Sierra, vice president of marketing and product development for Budco. “For example, a woman with a family might receive a mailer with an image of a family and the car that she owns.”

For the 1:1 Lab test, Ford mailed more than 20,000 pieces to owners of Ford F-150 trucks whose factory warranties were near expiration. The mailer was done in two formats: a black-and-white letter with the Ford logo in color, and a full-color self-mailer. Each format then had two versions: one with basic personalization such as the recipient’s first name (such as Ford had been sending all along) and the other with more personalized messaging and greater VDP content.

The test ran from November 2008 to February 2009, as the U.S. car industry teetered on the brink of collapse and as automakers testified before Congress in an attempt to garner government aid. Despite these events, the personalized self-mailer with a wide variety of VDP content still achieved a 5.7-percent increase in response rates and a 35.7-percent increase in sales penetration as compared to the original mailer with much less personalization. “With mail, they can comfortably investigate the service contract that best fits their needs,” Bardusch says.

Based on the success of the test, Ford began this past September rolling out the VDP strategy across its entire direct mail program for extended service contracts. This will eventually result in more than 2 million pieces of relevant mail annually, Bardusch says. And the company will continue to test various formats for VDP content, including letters and self-mailers. “We always felt that if we learned more about customers and the customers could have a better understanding of us, we would do more business together,” Bardusch says. He adds that by personalizing each offer, Ford also was better able to communicate its product selection.

Xerox’s Sweeney says that the successes of campaigns such as Ford’s only do more to back up the contention by those at the 1:1 Lab that rich VDP efforts can translate into deeper customer relationships. “When a company starts looking at customer data from an overall point of view, it is able to start creating more relevant messaging and drive results from its direct mail,” she says.

Perception Isn’t Reality

Variable data printing (VDP) solutions like those offered through the Xerox 1:1 Lab go a long way toward increasing the relevance of a product or service to consumers — but marketers’ perception of the relevance of their messages may be a far cry from how consumers really view them.

How to shrink this gap?

“Remember that relevance is in the eye of the beholder,” says an independent study titled “Marketers: Stop the Abuse! Adopt Preference Management,” Forrester Research Inc., July 2009.

The study reports, “It’s baffling that 80 percent of marketers can claim that customer preference is a key factor in determining which message is sent to customers when only a handful even ask how often customers would like to hear from them.”

Findings in the report show:

• Only 33 percent capture customers’ preferred method of message delivery.
• A similar number (29 percent) capture the type of content that customers want to receive.
• Only 12 percent capture customers’ preferred frequency for receiving marketing e-mails.
• 8 percent capture preference for receiving direct mail and telemarketing calls.
• 30 percent of marketers who capture at least one type of preference data take no action based on that preference.

Clearly, it’s time more marketers stopped guessing at what their customers are thinking and started actually asking.

W.L. Gore scaled new marketing heights by capturing customer data while driving sales and brand awareness

By Natalie Engler

Just before Christmas 2007, Sharon Cook, retail marketing manager at W.L. Gore & Associates in Newark, Del., sat in her home office watching her latest direct mail marketing campaign unfold in near real time.

As she looked on, outdoor adventure enthusiasts who had recently received postcards and e-mails clicked on personalized URLs (PURLs) and completed a survey about purchasing habits and travel plans.

“There was immediate gratification in seeing evidence that the campaign was working,” Cook recalls. “It gave me a clear window into the consumer activity.”

The campaign — titled “Take Me to Everest” — was designed to achieve three goals: to sell more Merrell-brand hiking shoes made with Gore’s waterproof GORE-TEX® fabric, to collect data for future marketing efforts and to build brand awareness.

“The idea originated because we had done direct mail in the past using a database to do a GPS location for someone’s address, and saying ‘Dear X, Come to the store closest to you,’” Cook explains. “Those mailings were successful for redemption and tracking.”

She’d heard that PURLs could make the connection between direct mail and the Web even stronger, and wanted to see if they could help her achieve her marketing goals and generate shoe sales during the busy holiday season.

As it turned out, the results surpassed her expectations. “Take Me to Everest” generated a 16-percent average increase in sales of GORE-TEX® footwear during the two-week campaign timeframe compared to the same period the previous year.

To develop the campaign, Cook enlisted Associates Graphic Services (AGS), a graphic communication company in Wilmington, Del. Because Gore sells its products directly to manufacturers, the company didn’t have direct relationships with end-user consumers. So Gore brought in a retail partner, Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS). EMS had a targeted database of outdoor-shoe consumers a perfect fit for the campaign.

Cook worked with Karen Keenan, director of marketing at AGS, to determine the best approach for the campaign, which ultimately included postcards and an e-blast, each with a PURL. The postcards, e-mail messages and PURLs all had a consistent graphical look and feel. Each piece featured a Merrell hiking shoe and a youthful climber (both male and female) standing before a majestic mountain rising out of the clouds. The campaign featured 30,000 postcards and 30,000 e-mail messages sent to EMS customers.

The visuals were customized based on the recipient’s gender: women received postcards and e-mails showing a female climber (“Catherine”) and a woman’s hiking shoe, while men received materials displaying a male climber (“Anthony”) and a man’s hiking shoe. The text included two different incentives. One was a free gift of an aluminum water bottle or pedometer with the purchase of any shoe containing GORE-TEX.® The second — which was much more effective — was a chance to enter an online sweepstakes to win a free trip for two to Everest Base Camp in Nepal.

The postcards and e-mails also contained PURLs with the recipient’s name followed by TakeMeToEverest.com (e.g., www.JohnASample.TakeMeToEverest.com). When customers clicked on the PURL, or typed it into their browsers, they were greeted with a welcome screen displaying their first names in large outlined letters in the sky over the mountains and the tagline “One small step could take you all the way to Nepal.” Additional text explained how they could enter a random drawing for a trip to Everest Base Camp.

After registering, visitors received a three-question, multiple-choice survey (“Do you own any of the following types of footwear that use GORE-TEX® fabric or technology?”, “Which of the following [activities] did you do in the last 12 months?” and “Thinking about the last trip you took for your own pleasure (not business), how would you best describe it?”). These questions were designed to both measure and build brand awareness and to test whether the category of casual-but-rugged shoes for adventure travel was worth the companies’ continued investment.

For additional personalization, the contest entry screen was pre-populated with the customer’s contact information. If anything had changed or was incorrect, the customers made corrections. “I loved that we could switch images based on gender and customize the site by using the consumers’ names,” Cook says. “That resonated well with customers. It was targeted without being intrusive.”

It can be difficult to reach people during the holiday season, a time of heavy retail marketing traffic, AGS’s Keenan notes. And yet, despite the competition for consumers’ attention, many customers found the chance for a trip to Everest Base Camp well worth the effort required to complete the short survey. In fact, the campaign received an 8.6-percent total response rate (5,160 visitors) with 73 percent (3,766 visitors) completing the survey and updating their profiles — giving EMS the added benefit of a cleaner database.

Keenan says that adding a PURL to the marketing mix makes it easier to measure the success of an individual campaign. With the PURLs, Cook was able to sit back and watch as a backend “dashboard” revealed moment-by-moment how the campaign was faring. Tucked away in her home office, Cook measured the number of people clicking through, reviewed their answers to the survey questions and even collected additional data, such as the number of people who came because they had received an e-mail vs. direct mail, what time people logged in, how long they stayed and what browser they were using, among other things.

Through the answers to the survey questions, Cook also learned of people’s preferred outdoor activities and their favorite types of vacations. She also could determine how many knew whether shoes they had previously purchased contained GORE-TEX® fabric. The results showed that more than half of the customers who responded were familiar with the GORE-TEX® brand and confirmed that travel-appropriate footwear continued to be a promising category. Thanks to these results, Gore’s wholesale brand partners, such as Merrell, are continuing to develop the adventure-travel shoes.

The dashboard also let Cook measure the campaign’s ROI in real time, helping her demonstrate a direct return on every dollar she spent. “The back end of a PURL campaign is a measurement powerhouse,” Keenan says. “You can track whatever you choose, including sales, cost per visit, cost per completed survey, cost per closed opportunity and gross profit.”

What made the “Take Me to Everest” marketing expedition such a success, according to Keenan, was the combination of a targeted database, good creative and a great call to action. The Nepal trip was an enticing incentive. And results of the “Take Me to Everest” contest were the best holiday gift Cook could have hoped for, she says.

The entire promotion cost only around $20,000. And for that investment, Gore was able not only to capture useful metrics directly from consumers, but also present a holiday gift to EMS and Merrell: important retail and wholesale customers. EMS saw increased traffic in its stores and got its database scrubbed. And Merrell saw a lift in sales of hiking shoes.

“The success of the campaign has given us credibility to try new things and present new opportunities to our customers,” Cook says.

And in so doing, Gore has proven that it’s a company that can take its partners to new heights.

Campaign Synopsis

Company Name: W.L. Gore & Assoc.
Marketing technology solution: Personalized URLs
Number of items mailed: 30,000 postcards and 30,000 e-mails
Target audience: Purchasers of outdoor footwear
Total cost: $20,000
Impact of solution: Generated a 16-percent average increase in sales of GORE-TEX® footwear made by Merrell compared to the same period the previous year.

Don’t use PURLs when:
1. You’re doing prospecting or lead generation
2. You don’t have a targeted database of customers
3. You don’t have a good incentive or call to action
4. Your survey has more than five questions
5. Your landing page is hard to navigate
6. Your survey questions are overly aggressive

Mine, an experimental customized magazine, shows consumer interest for tailored content – and receiving print communications.

Interview by Lara Jensen

As magazine publishers experiment with new methods for delivering content, Time Inc., American Express Publishing Corp. and Lexus have given us a look at how the future of print might look.

Mine magazine — a customizable publication offered for a 10-week period earlier this year — let consumers influence the content and ads that would appear in each issue. And they even got to select a delivery method: print, online or smartphone. Surprisingly, most requested a printed copy.

Here, Wayne Powers, president of Time Inc. Media Group, discusses how customization and printed magazines are a powerful combination.

Deliver: How did Time come to create a customized magazine?

Powers: As Lexus planned the launch of the new 2010 RX, it joined forces with Time Inc. and American Express Publishing Corp. to create an integrated marketing campaign around the idea of driver-inspired design. The car comes with what Lexus calls “driver-inspired technology,” such as MP3-player connectivity operated through steering-wheel controls, and a remote-touch controller, similar to a mouse, for the pop-up navigation system.

In thinking about how we could bring our assets to market in a unique way on their behalf, we pinpointed several Time and American Express Publishing magazines that fit with Lexus’ targeted consumer from a demographic and psychographic point of view. From there, the idea evolved into looking at how we could take content from these various magazine brands and aggregate it in a way that the consumer would have some choice.

Deliver: Why was consumer choice important?

Powers: We wanted the end result to be aligned with the definition of the Lexus RX brand as user inspired. That’s why consumers were given the opportunity to choose five magazine brands from a list of eight — Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, In Style, Golf and Travel + Leisure — that they were the most interested in and would like to receive content from. Our editors then chose which content from each publication appeared in Mine. Lexus was the sole advertiser, with four full-page ads in each 36-page issue.

Deliver: How did you promote the program?

Powers: Advertising in the participating magazines and their Web sites drove consumers to a site where they were able to choose their content and delivery method. Within the first four weeks, consumers had signed up for all of the 31,000 print subscriptions available, and from launch until the end of the program, more than 20,000 people signed up to receive a digital version of Mine.

Deliver: Why do you think so many wanted a printed magazine in the mail?

Powers: I think consumers felt connected to the actual magazines themselves. The photography and the content they were expecting to see are things they are accustomed to seeing in a printed product. But it was the customization that really drew attention because it let them sample magazines they don’t subscribe to but may be interested in.

Deliver: What was the benefit of a customized magazine for Lexus?

Powers: Lexus was able to customize the ads for each recipient based on his or her interests using data from the sign-up process. During the process, consumers were asked a few simple questions to find the magazines that best matched their interests. For example, an ad might show a car driving on a local road or highlight a destination of interest. It was hoped that this would make consumers feel connected to the ads. So far, the data is proving this to be true. Of the consumers who signed up to receive Mine, 16 percent opted in to receive additional information about the new Lexus RX.

Deliver: Is customization something publishers and advertisers are looking to as they consider the future of print?

Powers: There’s a lot of interest around customization right now. We had more than 300 million media impressions around Mine and we’re receiving inquiries from the media and advertisers around the concept all the time.

One of the questions that advertisers are asking is whether the use of customization for ads can evolve to the point where consumers are not only influencing the messaging, but also the actual product that appears in the ads. For example, one consumer might be defined as an SUV driver while another a sedan driver. The question is, how can we evolve the ads and the content of the ads to address each of these consumers?

The editorial content may evolve as well. For Mine, the editors involved with each publication chose the content. However, one recipient may be more interested in international news while another leans toward national news. Are there ways we can better align the content within these magazines to match the consumers’ interests? Right now, we’re doing some investigating around these ideas.

Deliver: How do you feel about the increasing amount of personalized and customized mail?

Powers: I think the traditional direct mail channel is a very challenging place. What we like about Mine is that the consumer actually chose to receive this, either through the mail or digitally. So while the messaging may be viewed as direct to consumer, it is more of an engaged relationship. The ads that appeared in Mine are there because of what we know about our subscribers. So it’s a great way to get that direct-to-consumer relationship without being in a mass distribution medium.

An expert formula for pairing direct with e-mail.

By Neil Feinstein

In this economy, low-cost e-mail is still delivering a strong return on investment. But direct mail remains a vital part of the marketing mix because of its accountability. It just has to work harder and smarter and follow the direct marketer’s equivalent of E=MC2.

In the alchemy of marketing, relevancy equals response. When you know exactly who the customer is and what they care about, a meaningful mailbox message combined with an offer they can’t refuse is pure marketing gold.

But thanks to recent economic events, many marketers are shifting their budgets online from other channels, including direct mail, to save a few bucks. This isn’t necessarily the smartest move.

People still like — and respond to — mail. And rather than relying solely on e-mail, the best approach is a one-two punch. Our clients get the best response when they combine mail, e-mail and other channels. A perfect example is a campaign True North helped organize for a New York–based credit union looking to increase its membership.

We targeted existing members, sending them personalized e-mails featuring buttons that linked to a landing page where they could list family members and colleagues they thought should join the credit union. One week after the e-mails arrived in inboxes, 20,000 direct mail pieces landed in mailboxes to reinforce the message. The combination quickly produced 5,543 new members — 122 percent above expectations.

The campaign was successful because of its integrated approach that reflected a consistent message across multiple channels. E-mail was a way to prepare recipients for the direct mail piece they’d soon be finding in their mailbox.

So when should you use direct mail vs. Digital or another medium? Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses, so it’s really a decision of finance, simplicity and immediacy. Start online if all you have is an e-mail address. However, when time and money allow, direct mail with a refreshing and creative promotion might be the better way to go for the simple reason that, in this era of clogged inboxes, a great print piece really stands out.

Neil Feinstein is director of creative strategy for True North Inc., a New York–based advertising agency specializing in direct mail and Web design.

By Bruce Britt

It’s the question every business is now forced to ponder: how to steer through a long, crippling recession? Those seeking authoritative, real-world advice would be wise to consult the brass at Ford Motor Co.

In late 2008, just as a brutish economic downturn was blindsiding the American auto industry, Ford began a monthly market share surge that would prompt the company to boost 2009 production by 16 percent. Now, having dodged the consumer retrenchment that helped throw its U.S. competitors into turmoil, sales are up and Ford has former naysayers examining the company’s efforts for clues to success.

Of course, when the auto crisis exploded into full national view last year, many observers thought that Ford, the second-largest of the Detroit Three, would be the hardest hit. However, it has been Ford’s two domestic rivals that have suffered more. One’s CEO was canned by the President of the United States. The other automaker was sold to foreign interests. Both were recipients of large (and somewhat unpopular) government-funded bailouts that required drastic job cuts and plant closures. And even with the bailouts, both still were forced into Chapter 11.

Meanwhile, Ford has steadily moved toward recovery. The company refused the bailouts (a marketing coup in itself as it enhanced the impression that Ford’s circumstances weren’t as dire as others’.) And though Ford has certainly had its battles — the domestic auto industry has lost more than 400,000 jobs in the last decade — the company has avoided bankruptcy and other ugly public episodes that have befallen competitors. And more significant, Ford has begun to enjoy renewed success. In August, it reported that sales of new cars and trucks had edged up 1.6% in July from a year earlier, fueled by the government’s “Cash For Clunkers” program. The rise was the first year-over-year monthly sales increase for a Detroit automaker since January 2008.

Even a cursory peek under the hood of Ford’s success reveals some obvious keys to its reemergence: decisive leadership, innovative new vehicles and a streamlined lineup. An integrated marketing strategy has boosted Ford’s public perception and allowed the company key opportunities to recast the conversation about its products.

This is because, along with helping to bump sales, the marketing campaigns have also helped create an impression that Ford is stable and poised to ride out the recession. While other carmakers are forced to grapple with consumer fears about their solvency, the value of their warranty guarantees and the impact of foreign ownership, Ford is able to talk about its cars and trucks.
“Our biggest challenge is to improve favorable opinion and consideration,” says Ford senior director of marketing Matt VanDyke. “We’ve got to demonstrate to consumers that they need to put us on the shopping list. People know Ford, but they don’t know about the independent studies that show our quality is equal to, or better than, (foreign cars and trucks). So we’re inviting people to explore what we offer.”

Mixing in Mail

In extending this invitation, Ford has blended a range of marketing media in an effort to maintain a running conversation with a variety of consumers. Its marketing efforts have included massive Web portals, e-mail campaigns, personalized URLs and well-timed direct mail campaigns aimed at holding the brand faithful and luring competitors’ customers. Ford officials think the conversations have helped lead to conversions. “When we develop integrated marketing campaigns for model launches, direct mail is a key ingredient for us to be successful,” says VanDyke.

Tapping its customer database, Ford communicates with consumers who opt in based on Web site preferences or showroom leads. Most recently, Ford used direct mail to promote the 2010 Fusion. “We’ve looked at Ford sedans owners and those likely to be downsizing from bigger vehicles,” VanDyke says. “We reach out to those model owners and inform them about the Fusion, and invite them to come in and test drive and experience it.”

Another weapon in Ford’s direct mail arsenal is my FORD magazine, an opt-in, branded overview publication. “People want to know what we’re doing as a company, and (my FORD) provides a lot of that information,” VanDyke says. “It’s an incredibly efficient direct marketing tool that allows us to offer people our new product information in advance, general customer interest stories and private offers to generate additional sales for our brands.”

VanDyke says Ford customers consistently relate to the importance of direct mail. “Over and over, people tell us that when they print out pictures from our website on their personal printers, it doesn’t have that same emotional connection as the pieces we craft for projects like my FORD,” VanDyke says. “We will continue to make those pieces because customers continue to want it.”

A World of URLs

But customers also want the benefits of digital marketing components, and Ford is blending the Web into its marketing practices to satisfy them. According to VanDyke, more than 80 percent of Ford customers go online before they go into the showroom, which could explain the company’s pervasive online presence. At the company’s main site, consumers can spec out models, build and price vehicles and watch rich videos to experience and understand the product.
“What we find is that with the Internet, we can really provide the information people want while capturing the information they want to share with us,” VanDyke says. “By the time people show up in the showroom, they know exactly what they’re looking for.”

In July, the company launched www.fordvehicles.com, which also highlights the benefits of its cars and trucks. An additional site, www.fordstory.com, includes information about the company, sustainability, green technologies and other topical issues.

The company also recently launched letfordrecycleyourride.com, a site dedicated to explaining Ford’s role in the “Cash For Clunkers” program, which lets consumers trade in less fuel-efficient cars for vouchers toward more eco-friendly rides. Ford augmented the site’s message with more than 4 million direct-response mailings that further explained how customers could take advantage of the program. The four-page, 10”x6” foldover mailers included information on new Ford products eligible for the federal program, along with eligibility requirements, local dealer information and a reminder that the government program can be combined with Ford incentives. The mailers were followed up with additional postcard and e-mail appeals.

Ford has mixed its Web and mail efforts with social networks, too. “We allow people to aggregate the (digital) content, share it with their friends and Facebook pages and learn how to follow us on Twitter,” says VanDyke. “With all this, we’re still scratching the surface in the kinds of things that we can do.”

Momentum in the Marketplace

Early indications suggest that the marketing push is working even better than some might have expected. Analysts and consumers have taken notice of the leaner, meaner Ford. Beginning in 2007, the company received more initial quality survey awards from J.D. Power and Associates than any other automaker. As of July ’09, Ford’s market share had improved eight out of nine months. The Ford Fusion posted 2008 sales of 147,569 (June 2009 sales were 18,561 — a 26 percent increase over a year ago). “We’ve got dealers and customers demanding more,” says VanDyke.

Still, Ford isn’t done. Says VanDyke: “There’s a really positive sense of accomplishment here, but it’s far from satisfaction.” He says that carmakers have to continue to fight negative perceptions by getting messages out to customers through whatever channels work best. He points to Ford’s promotions of the government program as an example of how good marketing can aid industry recovery — and he’s particularly impressed with a more traditional element of the campaign. “The reason direct mail is such a great way to do this is because it’s targeted,” he says. “It’s personal and it’s relevant explicitly to the people we are able to reach out to.”

By Paula Andruss

The recession is over.

That’s right, I said it. Whether you agree, of course, is up to you and the economic indicators you trust. But I’m hardly alone in my declaration. From news journals on Wall Street and politicians in Washington, D.C., to Web sites dedicated to high finance, sightings of economic “green shoots” have abounded, as have suggestions that the worst of the downturn is behind us. And even pessimists who disagree still concede that the slowdown probably won’t continue too much longer.

So what do you do when prosperity returns? I raised this to the Harvard Business School’s John Quelch — who recently blogged on marketing after the recession — to get a better handle on how brands can survive the current climate while arming themselves for the recovery. We agreed that you should consider these actions for when the economy bounces back:

• Get up close and personal. One-to-one marketing is a necessity. Use personalized marketing via mail, e-mail and social platforms — and ideally a combination of all three — to stay close to existing customers and reinforce their commitment to your brand.

• Identify customers least affected by the recession. Focus on the recession-resistant part of your market and use the extensive info you have on your existing customers. That way you can come out swinging when recovery arrives.

• Determine how your customer has changed. Consumers have rethought brand loyalties and spending habits. Direct mail is easily measurable, so use your pieces to test which messages they’re responding to now.

• Stick to your core. Evaluate your brands to determine which have suffered least and focus your post-recession resources there. Now is not the time to experiment — wary consumers want what they already know. Put rebranding and expansions on hold until people are more comfortable.

• Rally the troops. Motivate and incentivize your employees to deliver a positive experience for consumers reentering the market. Educate them on any changes you’ve discovered about your customers since the recession began.

• Practice cost-effective courting. Look to social platforms, e-mail and direct mail to drive prospective customers when normalcy returns. Mail catalogs containing extensive information on a suite of products in lieu of one-off promotions.

• Take advantage of the fire sale. Leverage recession-inspired bargains before they vanish. Printers have likely lowered their prices, and contractors are eager, available and ready to deal, so ask for a discount.

• Get moving — now. Boost your marketing efforts now. If you wait for a proclamation that the rebound is officially here, you already will be behind. People will think of you first if you’re out there when the economy does pick up.

Paula Andruss is a Cincinnati-based freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Marketing News, Crain’s Chicago Business, WomensWallStreet.com and Work.com, among other places. She also runs her own Web site, paulaandruss.com.

By BRUCE BRITT

As CMOs search for better ways to target prospects and personalize campaigns, one Florida company has developed what it likens to the marketing equivalent of a heat-seeking missile — an online tool that sends direct mail to the growing army of Twitter users. Billed as “real PRINTED mail that connects to your online world,” the mailers include images and personalized messages to senders about their tweets and also contain codes and links to personalized online content.

Companies such as Box.net, Duct Tape Marketing and RealEstate.com have already flocked to the mailers created by Tampa-based enthusem as part of their outreach efforts. Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch, widely regarded as a marketing-industry influencer, described the integrated program as “the best of what offline and online communications has to offer.” The founder and CEO of enthusem, Steve Tingiris, forecasts that his company will have as many as 50,000 active users by the end of 2009.

In an online exclusive, Deliver recently talked with Tingiris about blending Twitter and other social networks with direct mail and the future implications of increased multi-channel interactivity.

DELIVER: What was the inspiration behind enthusem?
TINGIRIS: We imagined enthusem as a tool for sales and business development people to use for prospecting and sales follow-up. As smart as the online technology was getting, the people receiving the messages were getting smarter, too. They were becoming increasingly burdened by messages. Think about how many messages in your inbox are unread — it could be hundreds if you include e-mail, text messages, Twitter-direct messages, Twitter replies and Facebook messages. With this volume of messaging going out, there’s no way that we marketers are going to see the response rates we need.

So rather than create a tool that would allow you to get in front of 10,000 people and get 10 or 11 responses, what if there was a tool that would get you in front of 10 to 100 people for the same value you would get from 10,000? So we began sending messages via direct mail to people saying, ‘Hey, we’re following you on Twitter.’ They got a kick out of that.

DELIVER: Describe the nuts and bolts of the enthusem process.
TINGIRIS: We’re not a printer. We aggregate the orders and do all the prepress stuff here. Any user can upload any picture they want to print on the front of the card. The 8.5″ x 5.5″ folded cards then go out in a vellum envelope, so the picture that’s on the front of the card shows through. We impose all of the individual orders into one rip-ready file for the digital presses. Then our system is linked into a few vendors that we distribute the jobs to.

DELIVER: How does enthusem know where to send the cards? If I’m following someone on Twitter, they don’t necessarily have my address.
TINGIRIS: When we follow someone on Twitter, we view their Twitter profile first, which usually contains a link to their Web site. From the Web site we get their postal address. Currently this is a manual process, but we’re working on a semi-automated approach that will help minimize a lot of the manual work in getting postal addresses appended to the Twitter ID.

DELIVER: What has response been like?
TINGIRIS: The response rates to the cards are off the charts. I think in the past couple of months we’ve had 3,000 to 4,000 users sign up. Across all the users, we’re seeing response rates that are more than 17 percent. So when somebody sends a card and attaches it to an online file, 17 percent of those recipients are actually going online and typing in the code to get that information.

DELIVER: How is the combination of direct mail and Twitter enhancing interactivity between offline and online?
TINGIRIS: I think if you’re really going to make a social connection, at some point the connection needs to go offline, or it’s just not social. Finding an elegant way to transition from electronic messaging to analog messaging and then to print is something we thought direct mail could do. It’s a way of taking the discussion a step further.

DELIVER: Do you think there is potential for even greater interactivity between offline and online communications?
TINGIRIS: I absolutely think so. There are some new XML standards for portable contacts, which is something that was recently adopted by Google, that standardizes the way information is stored. It allows social networking sites to share contact information amongst one another, including postal information. Which means that now, if I’ve got my Google contacts, or my contacts at LinkedIn, or any one of those sites, I can share them across my social networks, and it becomes one or two clicks to send a printed communication using a service like enthusem. There’s a whole new frontier for direct mail.

By Samar Farah

Many companies have been thrown off course by the recession. Possibly that’s because they’re forgetting that, no matter how bad things get, we’ve been through all of this before. Other companies have more of a longitudinal perspective and can fall back on institutional memory and a reassuring sense of how the company has managed through previous downturns.

Of course, there’s no simple formula to brand longevity. But many marketers agree that the difference between iconic brands that succumb to an economic downturn and those that survive is the ability to maintain a long-term outlook and strategy. What sets apart such long-lasting, iconic brands as AT&T, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and AAA is their conviction to stay the course, irrespective of marketplace turmoil. Among them, these companies have more than 250 years of longevity, which has meant surviving countless up-and-down business cycles, partly because they didn’t cower in the corner waiting for the storm to pass.

In other words: Don’t hit the panic button. A company that panics right now is likely to take desperate measures that can hurt the brand’s identity. “A lot of companies are going overboard with frequent sales and advertising cuts,” says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, associate professor of marketing at Golden Gate University. These steps might sound like a good idea in the short-term, she says, but drastic reductions in advertising expenditures can hurt brand awareness. Strahilevitz says that marketers want their brand to be top of mind within their category and warns that “if your target audience doesn’t hear about you for awhile, they start to forget you and you may see this reflected in future sales.” As for offering products and services at previously unthinkable discounts, Strahilevitz says, “This can obviously be great for a quick spike in sales. However, because many consumers see price as an indication of quality, offering frequent deep discounts could affect your brand image. Prices paid today also influence consumers’ expectations about future prices, and that in turn means that today’s deep discount may end up eroding your future profit margins.”

To help you ensure that your company will be around for the long haul, we’ve amassed some sage advice from long-standing brands that have survived past downturns. Here, then, are their rules for making it through the storm.

Don’t cut spending

Ironic as it may seem, a recession is the worst possible time to make wholesale cuts to your marketing spend. That’s how Jeff Meyer feels. Meyer is a senior vice president at Feld Entertainment, an organization that includes the Ringling Bros. Circus. “Advertising continues to be of great importance for us,” he says. “We can’t cut back in today’s economy.” In many markets, he says, “we’re holding flat, and in opportunistic markets we’re actually spending more.”

One of the most important parts of Meyer’s efforts is direct mail. “We’re using mail now for the simple reason that the return on investment is measurable,” he says. “We know what we’re gonna get when we send out direct mail.” When Feld recently handled “Disney’s High School Musical: The Ice Tour,” Meyer tested the waters with a mail piece to his core customers. “The response to that mailing dictated how much money we spent on our advertising mix for the remainder of that engagement.”

For Meyer, what sets mail apart in any economy is its tangible nature, its ability to bring the events that Feld promotes to life. Which makes it more likely that one of the recipients will want to hold onto the piece, even tack it up on the fridge or a bulletin board. “There’s nothing more that we’d like,” says Meyer, “than to have a piece of our direct mail with a poster foldout on a child’s wall from one year to the next, and then replace it with a new one when our next show comes to town next year.”

Differentiate yourself from the competition

During the recessions of the early ’90s, the early 2000s and today, AAA’s brand strategy has remained the same: to strengthen the brand’s identity as a member-driven organization that stands for trust and safety. Rather than slashing its marketing budget or competing for members with price cuts, the organization looks for ways to remind its target audience of the AAA brand value. “In any recession, we just continue to do what we do best,” says Darlene Entringer, director of membership and brand marketing at AAA’s national office in Heathrow, Fla.

Thus, recent marketing efforts — like new smartphone applications that list AAA member discounts and an information-based campaign called AAA Seniors — reaffirm trust and safety as core brand values. They also promote additional long-term AAA goals like differentiating the brand in the marketplace, enhancing its relevance to consumers and diversifying its use of media.

As robust as AAA is right now, Entringer doesn’t mind pointing out that “AAA is starting to experience more competition than we’ve had to face in 107 years.” Some of the benefits AAA offers members, such as emergency roadside service, are becoming commoditized. Given the current economic climate, another brand might decide to shelve the task of differentiating itself — which is likely to tax marketing budgets in the short term — and focus instead on maintaining the bottom line. But for Entringer, differentiation is a priority these days.

In early 2009, AAA unveiled a new mobile phone application called AAA Discounts. The software allows smartphone users to identify nearby locations, such as restaurants and hotels, that honor AAA discounts. There have been nearly 350,000 downloads, and AAA clubs have just begun promoting the new product. Entringer is excited about the response so far and equally happy that the new product satisfies key long-term AAA branding goals. There are plenty of companies that offer roadside service, but few organizations can deliver the combination of services and products that AAA is continually building, says Entringer. The brand is setting itself apart from the competition by offering members the unique package of products and services.

Know your customer — even better

Pursuing long-term goals doesn’t mean ignoring current trends. One of AAA’s long-term goals is to enhance its relevance to members, and on some level that means responding to what’s happening now. “You want to take the issue of the day — what’s going on nationally — and bring it down to the individual. How is it affecting them at home?” says Yolanda Cade, managing director, AAA Public Relations. Marketers tend to scrimp on consumer relationships during tight financial times, mistakenly assuming that they can intuit what consumers are thinking. In the long term, this can weaken a brand’s relationship with its customers.

That’s a mistake that AAA is determined to avoid. The brand had a strong tradition of conducting focus groups prior to developing a new campaign. But at the start of 2008, when AAA was at the front end of a new campaign called AAA Seniors — targeting aging drivers — it decided to beef up its research practices. At a time when many brands might take a more fiscally conservative approach, AAA invested in additional layers of research, such as national polling and media audits, in order to better pinpoint members’ concerns and priorities.

What emerged from AAA’s research was that individuals who look after an elderly mother or father or aunt or uncle want to know more about how to broach the subject when driving becomes unsafe, as well as alternative modes of transportation that are available for the elderly in their cities and towns. The result is a AAA microsite that features in-depth information about when it’s time to have a chat with an elderly parent or grandparent about driving and how to negotiate those delicate conversations. The site also offers information about local public transportation options that would help elderly drivers avoid navigating poor road conditions on their own.

After establishing a pilot site in Phoenix and Miami, AAA launches the site nationally this July, targeting both seniors and caregivers. Cade says regional AAA clubs will have the option of using the campaign creative in a number of ways, including as direct mail flyers to reach seniors.

Shift dollars to the most effective channels

Again, cutting your marketing spend across the board could be disastrous, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make changes. John Nordberg, AVP of creative services for B-to-B at AT&T, says that his company relies on rigorous testing to make sure that the media mix, and the particular offers, are performing optimally for the company. “During tough times, you don’t want to cut your marketing activities,” he says. “You just need to be a little bit smarter about them.”

For example, Nordberg recently oversaw a campaign to win back customers who had defected to other services. “We mailed them a piece within a certain number of days or weeks after they had left us,” he says. “And we put a special offer in front of them to entice them to come back.” Nordberg employed a range of offers and a varied array of mail pieces. “We’ve done several different iterations of the win-back pieces,” he says. “Everything from postcards to self mailers to #10 envelopes.”

Based on the results, Nordberg and his staff have shifted their efforts to the pieces and offers that performed best. “We’re trying to create this learning database so that we can go back and say, ‘OK, what worked best for an offer that looks like this?’” he says. “You can run a campaign like that in five to 10 weeks, so you can run several of those campaigns every year. After each campaign, you sit down and evaluate what worked best so you can make adjustments and be back in the market with another creative piece within just a few weeks.”

The folks at AAA also adjust their media tactics during a recession. AAA regional clubs have their own marketing budgets and are responsible for promoting campaigns at the local level. “In better economic times, our club spends a larger portion of their budget on ‘brand marketing,’ or soft marketing,” says Alexandra Morehouse, senior vice president of brand experience for AAA of Northern California. The goal of this kind of marketing is strictly to boost awareness, typically through mass media advertising that builds an emotional connection but doesn’t necessarily offer a quantifiable return on marketing.

But when there’s pressure to conserve budgets during a recession, AAA of Northern California shifts dollars away from soft marketing in television and radio channels to direct response marketing. “During all three recent downturns we switched spend and emphasis to direct response media,” says Morehouse.

In the recession of the early ’90s, this meant more marketing dollars went to channels like direct mail and direct response TV. The recessions that have followed — the downturn of 2001 and today — have seen a steady increase in Internet-based direct response marketing at the Northern California club. Still, despite this increase, Morehouse says that “our highest-performing and most consistent channel is still direct mail.”

Ultimately, what distinguishes companies like AT&T, AAA and Feld Entertainment from the brands that fall victim to desperate, recession-driven measures is a combination of forward-thinking strategy and a commitment to proven best practices. And that combination will make it a lot more likely that these brands will remain part of the economic landscape for a long time to come.

Visit www.delivermagazine.com for our “Rising Above the Recession” Web series on marketing in tough times, which includes more on how AT&T and Feld Entertainment have survived economic downturns.

New, more sophisticated efforts show a growing respect for the gay and lesbian audience – and its buying power

By Anne Stuart

With sales down and its product line not generating the excitement it once did, car maker Saturn decided that it needed to overhaul not only its cars, but also its marketing focus. Even as the company dedicated itself to a “product renaissance” starting in 2006, it was also looking to make a bigger splash as a major marketer, seeking out new audiences that would show loyalty to the brand and evangelize on its behalf.

It didn’t take long before the automaker realized that the buying attitudes and behavior it was seeking abounded in at least one audience that also seemed heavily drawn to Saturn’s new line: the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community. “We’d dabbled in working with this demographic group for a couple of years, and we had more and more [GLBT] customers coming into the showrooms,” explains Ross Bird, who was an assistant divisional marketing manager for Saturn during the lineup overhaul. “From a finance standpoint, they tended to be good customers with good credit. More important, they seemed like a loyal group of customers. Once you sold them, they’d come back — and they’d bring friends.”

In overseeing Saturn’s integrated push to communicate with GLBT consumers — an effort that blended direct mail with event planning and other marketing outlets — Bird also witnessed firsthand what an increasing number of big-brand marketers now realize: namely, that the GLBT community is a consumer force that cannot be denied.

While it’s still a niche market — researchers estimate that the GLBT audience represents about 6 to 7 percent of the total U.S. adult population, or about 15.3 million adults — it’s a particularly influential one, with gay men and lesbians in particular wielding enviable buying power. Overall, market projections suggest that this adds up to $712 billion in annual purchasing power.

And those numbers have never been more important than they are right now. “As a community, we seem to be a little more immune to the economic downturn,” notes David Posegay, advertising director for the magazines Out and The Advocate. “It may be because so many of us are professionals with dual incomes and no children.”

For all those reasons, dozens of industries — from automakers to airlines, credit cards to companies, banks to breweries and beyond — are trying to tap into this lucrative market. As they do, they are realizing that it takes more than showing a same-sex couple in ads or pasting a rainbow flag, the unofficial banner of the GLBT community, on a mail sample. “The (companies) that communicate to GLBTs authentically are being rewarded with market share,” says Andy Bagnall, vice president and account director for Prime Access, a New York City–based multicultural advertising agency that has run many GLBT campaigns.

Saturn’s Story

Saturn was determined to be one of those companies. A while back, the automaker partnered with Atlanta-based Gaywheels.com, a gay-friendly car information site, to participate in the Atlanta Pride Festival and Orlando’s Gay Days®* Spread out over several days, each festival attracted thousands of attendees from the Southeast and beyond.

At both, Saturn sponsored parade floats and pool parties, handed out T-shirts with the slogan “Does your ride reflect your pride?” and took hundreds of pictures, which attendees could later order in commemorative frames via Gaywheels.com.

Festival-goers could also visit Saturn’s tents to check out the new models — and fill out survey cards indicating their interest in learning more about them. Marketers sent the cards to Saturn dealers in attendees’ hometowns, and those dealers followed up with customized mailed invitations to visit.

The effort generated an uptick in car sales, but more important, it proved that Saturn could influence brand perception among a coveted group of buyers. “The overwhelming conclusion was that it was a huge success in terms of connecting with that group in a non-traditional way and changing its perception of the brand,” says Bird, now a regional GM distribution manager. “We heard comments like, ‘We never considered Saturn before, but now you’re on our list.’”

Bird also gives credit to Saturn’s partnership with Gaywheels.com and its founder, Joe LaMuraglia, who connected the automaker with festival organizers, designed an integrated ad campaign and promoted Saturn’s activities on the Web site before and after the events. “He opened a lot of doors for us, giving us instant credibility with this audience,” recalls Bird.

LaMuraglia says it’s impossible to overestimate the importance of that credibility. “You’re dealing with very savvy consumers,” he says of the GLBT community. “If you do it without any thought, if you do it wrong, it’s going to backfire on you.”

The Baltimore County Police Department is turning to personalized direct mail in its fight against crime. The department recently sent customized letters to owners of specific models of cars commonly targeted by auto thieves. The letters shared anti-theft reminders like keeping doors locked and parking in well-lit areas. The campaign resulted in a 38-percent reduction in thefts of those models. “The personalized letter certainly caught the owners’ attention, and the results exceeded our expectations,” says police spokesman Bill Toohey. The county plans future mailings that will target owners of other high-theft models.
— Vicki Powers

Eliminating state income tax may appeal to some, but when one Massachusetts political organization learned that their state was considering the idea, the group fought against it aggressively.

Coalition for Our Communities sent out oversized postcards to nearly 600,000 families, warning that cutting the tax would devastate their neighborhoods. The front displayed the recipient’s name and town on street signs. On the back were details — specific to each of the 351 individual towns — on how the proposed reduction would shortchange schools, public safety and other local services.

“You have to know what you are losing personally” with a tax cut, says Harris Gruman, campaign director for Coalition for Our Communities. Gruman says using variabledata printing boosted the effort. “I think seeing their name pictured on the street sign grabbed a lot of people’s attention,” he says.

Visits to the coalition’s Web site (votenoquestion1.com) increased significantly after the mailing. Nearly 70 percent of voters opposed the measure.
— Charlotte Huff

Customized mailings help a New England car dealership nudge sales higher

By Bruce Britt

When customers walk into a Prime Motor Group auto dealership to check out its vehicles, they may not drive off with a new car — but they haven’t heard the last of the dealership’s pitch either.

Rather, as part of an aggressive follow-up campaign, Prime Motor dealerships get their messages back in front of customers within days, this time in the form of a cutting-edge and highly personalized mailing that is winning rave reviews for its immediacy and detail — and winning the dealership business with its savvy.

Indeed, at a time when many companies are slashing their marketing due to economic uncertainty, Prime Motor franchises are raising the ante on their direct mail investment. Along the way, the Massachusetts dealership group is proving that smart and consistent customer communications, not fewer, can offer businesses distinct advantages over competitors too skittish to maintain vigorous marketing efforts.

Dubbed the “Thank You for Visiting” campaign, the Prime Motor effort centers on a 5 1/2-by-8-inch postcard that the franchise mails to prospective customers within days of their visit to one of the import dealership’s showrooms or its Web site. Made of heavy, high-gloss stock, the card naturally features the prospect’s name, a minimum for customized mailings. But in an even deeper dive into the personalization pool, the card also provides the names, contact information and photos of the specific salesperson who pitched the prospect and of the sales manager who assisted. Further, the card includes a photo of the exact model, color included, that the mail recipient test drove (or showed interest in online) and a savings coupons for that particular auto.

The card bears a message from a Prime Motor Group general manager: “Thank you for your recent visit to our dealership. I hope you found your sales consultant to be helpful and informative. I want you to know that we are committed to providing you with a buying and ownership experience truly ‘like no other.’” The message concludes with direct contact info and an invitation for the customer to call or e-mail with any questions, comments or suggestions.

When the franchise implemented the campaign, the idea was to make deeper inroads into the finicky Boston luxury car market and to reinforce brand perception of Prime Motor as an industry leader. “We’re trying to give that customer some enticement to return to the dealership and make a purchase,” says Anthony Monteiro, former director of business development at Prime Motor Group and the brains behind the “Thank You” campaign. “It’s absolutely an attempt to establish a relationship and trust, but it’s also an attempt to wow the customer, to receive this postcard and basically run in the house and say, ‘Holy mackerel! Look at this!’”

Copier giant Ricoh wooed scores of tech execs with a personalized campaign designed to appear to their egos

By: Elaine Appleton Grant

Selling photocopiers isn’t exactly the sexiest game in town. For the marketing professional seeking glamour, copiers rank up there with refrigerators and plumbing supplies. But Hothead Studios, a six-person agency in Atlanta, managed to create such a glamorous and successful campaign for the products from copier maker Ricoh that the agency not only won a prestigious DMA ECHO Gold award, it won extra business from Ricoh as well. And it punched home an old marketing truth at the same time: Don’t sell the product; sell its benefits.

Before copiers became digital do-everything wonders, manufacturers sold them to office managers or COOs. Now, however, some of that responsibility has shifted to CIOs and IT directors — and they don’t necessarily want it, says Pat Berryhill, account manager at Hothead. Research showed that most IT professionals see copiers as pesky obligations rife with humdrum user connectivity issues. “It was a challenge to get in front of the CIO and the IT director,” Berryhill says.

Ricoh already had one campaign promoting its digital copiers return meager results. So Berryhill and her client, Ricoh marketing manager Linda Lindsey, decided to put less focus on the product. Instead, they thought about what makes a CIO tick.

The pair settled on a campaign designed to appeal to CIOs’ egos by depicting prospects as leaders who use Ricoh’s advanced technology to solve major problems for their companies. Using variable data printing technology, the creative team produced three mock book covers (segmenting their list based on occupation) and emblazoned them with titles like Still Doing Business in a Black & White World? The prospect’s name appeared, as the author, in a giant head-turning font at the bottom of the page. “Boy genius!” Berryhill says. “Partners with Ricoh!”

The company mailed the faux books to 1,984 CIOs and IT directors at Fortune 1000 companies. Inside the cover was a blank journal in which recipients could make notes. It was hoped that the pad of paper inside would give recipients a practical reason to keep the promotional piece on their desks, where colleagues would see it. A few weeks later, Ricoh sent fictional press clippings about prospects’ “book signings.” Finally, the company directed prospects to a Web site where visitors could download case studies and apply for a 10-percent rebate on high volume purchases.

But the creative wouldn’t get the job done without sales follow-up, says Berryhill. Copier purchases are typically a large financial commitment for a company. For a major expenditure like this, salespeople would have to follow up. “If you don’t involve the salespeople at the beginning, they won’t support your wonderful campaign. You might as well put your money in a hallway and set it on fire,” Berryhill says. So, to keep the 90-person sales team interested, the marketers also printed up book jackets with salespeople’s names on them.

Lindsey also pulled in the salespeople to provide the list. Ricoh scrubbed the list before printing the customized mailers, a move key to the program’s success, Lindsey says. Lindsey also got sales reps to spend a full day calling sales hubs around the country. By offering salespeople the chance to win prizes like flat-screen TVs, Lindsey provided them with incentives to make appointments.

Whether the experts who received the “books” considered themselves geniuses or not, Ricoh wound up thinking of Hothead that way. The campaign transformed recalcitrant prospects into converts at an unprecedented 18-percent response rate and an ROI of well over 100 times expenditures.

Mitchell Lieber is chair of the ECHO Awards and a direct marketing consultant in Chicago. While the campaign’s cleverness impressed him, he also gave Hothead and Ricoh points for its execution. They paid as much attention to the cleanliness of the list and to careful follow-up as they did to the creative, he says: “They carried the creative idea through; they made the responses trackable by who responded and who didn’t.”

Since then, Ricoh has turned to Hothead to do book- and magazine-cover campaigns for many of its divisions. And Hothead has used the technique to win several new clients.

Says Lieber: “A great creative idea very well executed can generate so many sales that it’s almost like you’ve created a printer that prints money.”

For Ricoh, nothing could be truer.