Using Rubber Chickens Can Improve Your VDP Jobs



Rubber Chicken



An interesting read on marketing tactics is Jon Spoelstra’s, Marketing Outrageously: How to Increase Your Revenue by Staggering Amounts! Jon details his experiences as a marketer for a variety of professional sports teams and provides plenty of examples of marketing outrageously. In one instance, renewals by season ticketholders for a pro basketball team were lagging. His technique for fixing the problem was to launch rubber chickens at those season ticketholders that were slow to renew.

We’ll explain how you can use the “rubber chicken” concept to jazz up your VDP projects.

Jon bought hundreds of the classic plucked rubber chicken, tied his message to a foot on each one and sent them in large, FedEx tubes normally used for drawings. If nothing else, the shear curiosity factor of receiving a mailing tube was enough to get the package opened…only to reveal a rubber chicken. The tag on the foot warned, “Don’t fowl out!”, and the accompanying material made a compelling offer for the ticketholder to sign up right away. The really creative campaign was a complete success.

Didn’t that cost a lot? Yes. However, Jon is also a fanatic about ROI. The thousands of dollars spent on the rubber chicken campaign paled in comparison to the revenue generated by the ticket sales. Nevertheless, we’ll leave the discussion about ROI for another blog to focus on outrageous marketing and variable data printing.

Another Rubber Chicken

The image on the left is one that we used in some of our own direct mail campaigns. Is it outrageous? Maybe. Provocative? Perhaps. Attention-getting? You bet. Did it get our message get read? Absolutely! In fact, we did an A/B test with the other piece being a dramatic shot of a snowboarder and some impressive “name-in-the-clouds” VDP text effects. You can probably guess how the test turned out. Writing on a woman’s stomach turned out to be our rubber chicken.

If you do go down the path of marketing outrageously, there is the potential for blow back. Our VDP girl campaign earned us an irate phone call from an older gentleman who was highly offended that his name appeared on the young lady’s stomach. He yelled something about it being evil at least five or six times. We apologized profusely and promised never to send him any more pornography (or anything else, for that matter). Besides that one complaint, we received plenty of kudos and inquiries from recipients…many of them from women. It certainly helped that our very creative (but sensible, conservative and female) graphic designer added the woman's perspective to things.

We see lots and lots of VDP jobs and, frankly, the majority of them seem more like rotten eggs rather than rubber chickens. Boring! It appears that many marketers have yet to recognize the creative and attention-getting potential of VDP. So, having firmly planted foot-in-mouth, we put together some suggestions for moving a little closer to the outrageous with VDP:

Ÿ Use a dramatic image that makes the piece stand out from the rest of the mail (a scantily clad woman is not necessary, however recipients are much more likely to be attracted to images of people or familiar objects or locations)

Ÿ Find a clever or unusual away to include the text with (or on) the image

Ÿ Make sure that the personalization stands out (it has less value if it can be easily overlooked or is hard to recognize)

Ÿ Also, make certain that everything looks clean and as natural as possible (it is easy to end up with weird-looking effects that can leave the wrong impression)

Ÿ Personalize with a simple message that compels the recipient to want to know why they got the piece

Ÿ You don’t always have to spell out the purpose or sender on the front of the piece (a bit of mystery can heighten interest to read the message on the back)

Ÿ Consider adding some additional personalization to the message on the back - even something as simple as versioning for gender, age, interest, political issue, etc. that connects with the recipient

Help your customers find their own rubber chicken and they may never think of you again as just a printer. For that matter, create a rubber chicken to launch at your own customers.

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