Direct Marketing News

Pink isn’t just a color, it’s an attitude loaded with meaning. Use it to catch someone’s attention, rouse their curiosity, even passion and just sometimes, to up the “uh oh” anxiety level of the reader.

This was the approach used by some magazine promotional company several weeks ago. The pink really caught my eye because pink in the mail generally means something important, perhaps a late payment. The mailer also had some interesting touches which also made it seem very important:

• Preprinted indicia was very light, must have been up to the maximum allowed by the post office.
• It said, Important Delivery, in red and blue - very patriotic.
• It used the sort of old-fashioned but government-like dot-matrix impact printing for the name/address box as well as repeated OFFICIAL NOTICE with the same treatment.
• Had a nice red DO NOT FOLD
• Had a huge black rectangle for the “too important for other eyes to see” area
• In the inset, we had an Open for Instructions/ID will expire and adjacent, in the same impact printing, an ID number, date and time.
• Final touch, handwritten name, initials for company name, address, city, state, and zip written on the fill-in lines in the corner card area.

Of course, I had to open it.

Inside was a matching pink sheet touting a sweepstakes offer, call the 1-800 number, etc. Nothing all that different than promotions we’ve seen before. But this one used Shape Magazine’s logo prominently. In the small print, it said the publisher allowed its logo to be used for promotional purposes. This could work for the mailer or against them. The mailing was addressed to my husband, but Shape is generally considered a women’s magazine, so affiliation between brand and prospect gets fuzzy.

This is the kind of mailing reeks with the low-class, deceptive junk mail tactics that give our profession such a big black eye. But the pink color, snap pack format, the impact printing all worked to get me and I’m sure thousands into the envelope.

Consider how you could use the power of pink for your next campaign!

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Still running around the jewellery shops in your lunch hour to find the perfect jewellery gifts?