Marketing works, but maybe not how you think…

Posted by Thai Arizpe on 28 August 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: Marketing, advertising, catalog, online

As an advertiser, you send a direct mail piece to your target audience. You reach out to them with an online ad. You launch a full-scale TV and print campaign. You even go so far as to buy a billboard placement. Now that the money is out the door, how do you measure success?

I thought about this just yesterday as I rummaged through my mail and found a catalog addressed to me called ‘1st Wishes’. The catalog was filled with decorations for children’s 1st birthday parties – which we all know are sacred (and quite expensive, especially for those naïve first-time-parents/suckers out there).

As a marketer, this precise marketing made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside since my daughter will be turning 1 in October and we’ve just begun planning her birthday celebration. The timing for the catalog was impeccable (they obviously purchased my name from the hospital or Babies R’ Us or somewhere else that knew my daughter’s birth date).

Anyhow, with my best intentions, I decide to go online to said catalog’s website and being browsing party decorations. But because I could not remember the name of the catalog, I ended up conducting an online search on Bing for ‘1st birthday decorations’ and up popped a bunch of sites that specialize in JUST that special occasion (how would have thought?). I ended up spending an absurd amount of money at another site (Birthday Direct), but not the original site that marketed to me.

In this situation, Bing won for the click, and Birthday Direct won for the purchase. But poor 1st Wishes lost, let’s say, $1.00 by sending me a catalog that I did not end up purchasing from.

However, I would argue this actually was not a complete loss for 1st Wishes. First, I did notice and flip through the catalog. Second, I went to visit the CATEGORY of 1st birthday decorations. And finally, I am writing about it here.

Let’s talk about the second point – the fact that I visited the category. So my awareness that there is a category like this has now gone from nothing to complete awareness. I can now inform all my friends and family members about these sites and I will continue to come back to the category around the same time every year and I won’t necessarily always shop the same vendor.

So my question is this: did 1st Wishes really lose? As marketers, it is important to look at both global wins and individual wins. 1st Wishes didn’t ‘win’ me as a customer, but they did ‘win’ a new person to this category.