IN CASE OF EMERGENCY CONTACT GASP

The Brief

The vast majority of Staples’ Italian and French customers are SME’s of 3 or less employees. Staples’ average response rate from prospect catalogues in

France and Italy is just 0.28%. In Italy alone, they were planning to spend over a million euros purely on sending out catalogues. They briefed us to consider new ways to target their audience with reduced costs and increased responses as part of a bigger strategy to challenge the status quo.

The Response

During our research phase we established that a typical SME customer will only do a full stationery order when they run out of paper. On top of that 62% of all new SME customers bought paper in their first transaction leading us to assume a high degree of these were also ordering in response to an “office mini emergency”.

Our direct mail campaign was a visually striking and tongue-in-cheek 3D red box that held an emergency sheet of white A4 paper behind acetate - ‘In Emergency – Break Glass’.

There was a highly targeted mailing volume of 20,000 per country, making it logistically very challenging, but our thorough researching of the Italian and French postal systems ensured everything ran smoothly.

The Results

The campaign achieved over 30% increase in response rate, compared to the average catalogue sending campaign, a very pleasing increase. In both Italy and

France, Staples’ sales and redemptions typically had a heavy northern cities bias, but our campaign’s positive response rate was across a far more even geographical spread, reflecting the universal appeal of the idea. As part of the campaign follow up, we hired native speakers to carry out a thorough call around in both countries to gauge success and response. From this, 34% of those spoken to recalled the campaign and were interested in the offer.