Happiness

Background

Friends find e-mail easier than the post when they want to communicate with each other. A huge problem for Swedish Post.

However, research revealed that while people may find sending mail too demanding, recipients love getting it.

The task, then, was to make it fun to send a friend something that simply could never be e-mailed and get people to reappraise the post.

Idea

Sweden eats more candy than any other country. That led to the simple insight that ‘a licorice twist makes everyone happy’.

A website called ‘Happiness By The Metre’ was set up, where visitors could choose three different flavours of candy twist and then choose a length of it to send to a friend.

The nicer your mate, the longer the licorice.

Once payment was made online, the twist was packaged and mailed with a note from the sender.

Results

After one day, 500 metres of candy had been bought and posted. Within three days, 1500 metres had been sent and after a week 4,500 metres had been dispatched and the candy was all gone.

It proved that even web-savvy youngsters could be persuaded to send tangible greetings to their friends.

Our Thoughts

All you need to be is a parent to see how much young people like getting mail. It doesn’t matter what it is, there’s a sense of anticipation. “Ooh, for me!” Then there’s the proprietorial thing. “Mind your own business, this is MY letter.”

It’s a pity, then, that my kids don’t send and receive as many letters as my generation did. Stuck at boarding school, I sent out dozens of letters a week in envelopes hand-made from brightly coloured wallpaper. Today, teenagers and twenty-somethings neither need to be inventive nor do they have to put in the effort it takes to write a decent letter. So a campaign like this that gets them experiencing the pleasures of mail is to be applauded.

Where e-mail is so often thoughtless, this is thoughtful. A couple of metres of twizzle through the post makes friendship more real than getting poked, don’t you think?