Thank You Notes
Issue 13 | December 2009
Agency
Rapp, Auckland
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Wayne Pick, Creative Director Tribal BBD: Daniel Wright, Associate Creative Director: Pat Murphy, Senior Copywriter: Susan Young, Senior Designer: Katie Benge
Production Team
Tim Cullinane
Other Credits
Group Account Director: Colin Rebairo, Account Director DDB: Libby Weston-Webb
Date
June 2009
Background
The number of small dogs in New Zealand is growing, and so too is the market for premium dog food. Keen for a slice of it, Heinz Wattie’s developed Gourmet Dog and tasked the agency with finding a way to introduce small dogs and their owners to the new product, and to engage them in a way that would generate a pool of leads for ongoing communications.
Idea
To capture the hearts of our audience, it was important to show that Wattie’s understood the intimate role dogs play in their family and emotional life.
The idea was to do this by giving dog owners an opportunity to publicly write a ‘thank you’ note to their dogs for their unconditional love and affection.
A special website was created, alotoflove.co.nz, and to encourage people to start sharing their notes, a competition offered winners portraits of their pets shot by well-known photography brand, Rachael Hale.
Prospects were mailed a free sample and a coupon and invited to go online. Point of Sale and banners also spread the word.
Once online, customers completed a form that included details like their dog’s name, breed, birthday, ‘pet loves’ and ‘pet hates’, giving us valuable information for future communications.
Results
From the mailing to 10,000 potential customers, 7,750 visited the website.
1814 uploaded thank-you notes with a total of 2,871 thank-you notes in total, an 18% sign-up rate, which was three times the original campaign objective. Anyone who writes a thank-you receives a free sample, thus growing the database. In time this will help a CRM programme develop.
8.6% of the coupons were redeemed, again three times the usual rate and the follow-up email was opened by 51.64% of all recipients, almost twice the average open rate for emails.
Many notes were searingly honest and personal – ‘Thank you for being there when I was lonely, had no family, and needed company’ and ‘Thank you for being the best therapy in the world.’
Our Thoughts
Editor’s Comments
If you are the sort of person Caitlin Ryan refers to on P.7, young, male, urban and thirtysomething, then this campaign will curl your toes. On the other hand, if you’re a dog-loving widow in your fifties you won’t think of this as marketing, you will think of it as an opportunity to express your deep and true feelings for your pet.
Young creatives almost always avoid sentiment and try to be funny but here, fortunately for Wattie’s, some wise old heads set about the task without embarrassment, knowing precisely who they were talking to and how to move them. And, in the process, how to move more cans of dogfood.