Recently I got a letter in the mail from a company I do business with. The letter was a bit of poetry- rhyming poetry, no less - addressed to me with the sentiment that it had been a while since I'd made a purchase, and they missed me. There was also a coupon inside for 20% off.
I kept the coupon and threw the poem away.
It felt....weird
Honestly, I don't really know how I feel about it. It didn't move me. It didn't make me more likely to go back and buy their product (though the coupon is certainly an incentive). From the perspective of a Business Analyst, I have to say that this approach to marketing is risky, at best. It would seem to me that you'd have to know your target market very well to pull this off. The letter I got didn't really meet that requirement. It felt random, and because of that, it more or less fell flat.
I think that some businesses would get a lot of mileage out of the approach. BlueMountain (makers of fantastic online greeting cards) and Hallmark? Absolutely. I'd expect such a marketing tactic from either, or both of those companies, and any such mailings would likely be received with a smile. I'm not as sure, however, that I want poetry form the guys I buy my lawn equipment or power tools from. There's a disconnect there that makes me feel as though they're struggling to understand the business they're actually in, and that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
Yet using poetry in marketing missives seems to be a trend which is about to take off like a rash.
Horses For Courses
I'm not saying it couldn't be done. Envision such a letter, that, when you open it, you see a picture of Tim Allen with the CEO of the power tool company and below that there's a “Tim Allen style” bit of poetry. That could actually work for a company making power tools, but again, that's a very specific, narrowly targeted case.
I could even see it working for small law offices and other companies that spend a lot of intensive, one-on-one time with their customers. That puts it in a distinct minority of businesses, but definitely expands the playing field a bit.
Sometimes, experimental marketing knocks one out of the park, and when that happens, you wind up with a new arrow in your quiver that you can use to skewer the competition before they even knew what hit them. The risk, of course, is that for every success story you find like that, there are dozens of failures, flame outs, and instances where companies not only wind up with egg on their faces, but also risk losing customers.
Bad, But On the Other Hand, Is It Brilliant?
At the end of the day, I'd have to summarize it thus: as a general marketing strategy, it's probably a bad idea. Not an outright awful idea, but also not a good, general purpose one. Having said that, I'll also say that judiciously done, if the company can play off of well known star power (as in the Tim Allen tool time poetry example), or if the business is of a highly personalized nature to begin with (small law firms with limited clientele), or if poetry is part of their core business (BlueMountain/Hallmark), then a bit of personalized poetry-as-marketing could most definitely work. In fact, it could be sensational.
I would never trust such a strategy to a junior member of my marketing staff, however. It's too specific, and too much can go wrong. I'd definitely want my best people on it if I were going to do it at all.
