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Design to Print to Mail: Are We Crazy?

By Scott Gerschwer

Here's how I spent my summer: creating and producing a direct mail piece. It was my first application and to those of you who do this for a living, I Salute You.

This was hard work despite the fact that I had some of the best people in the business working with me. I had a great design firm, a great print partner, the best paper and some of the smartest people in the business to work with and it was still such hard work that I'm not sure I ever want to do it again.

If you want to see the application and you're here at Graph Expo, come by the Megaspirea booth (#3080) and I think you'll agree that it's a terrific mail piece, printed nicely on the Versamark and processed --envelope and all-- by our Mailliner 100.

But what this particular column will be about is how hard a job it was, and why. And what I plan to do in future columns is talk to some of the people I worked with from Kodak and Prinova and tap into their experience so that we can all learn from it and so that you, too, dear reader, can learn, too.

Now, I've designed mail pieces before. As the Director of Communications for a very ambitious New York State Senator I designed dozens of highly targeted pieces to go to very specific groups in our constituency. We were ahead of the curve in segmenting mailings by personal interest and preference. I learned a great deal from him as to how to reach out to the base and communicate with them effectively. I wrote the content and did the basic design and professionals working for the Senate would produce the piece and mail it for us. We used our franking privileges better than any other public official I know of and actually had other politicians calling us for pointers. So that's how I approached this direct mail piece.

The way I saw it, I had three interested constituencies: marketers, mail operations personnel, and executives. Our technology had a value proposition for each of them; I was particularly interested in ensuring that an organization would get at least two of these three mail pieces. That way they would see what we could do with personalization both on the envelope and on the documents inside and be very impressed.

So I set about designing three pieces. For the executives I wanted to use my "Blue Ocean" theme. I've read the articles in the Harvard Business Review about the Blue Ocean Strategy and was very taken with it. The basic idea is that industries where demand is fought over are "Red Oceans." Red like from the blood and the guts in the water after fighting over market share and engaging in price wars. There's no ocean more red than the ocean that the print/mail industry swims in.

In contrast, a Blue Ocean is where demand is created, generally by re-imagining the business and re-drawing the boundaries of the industry. It can be done with marketing-- we've had coffee for centuries, but we never had a coffee experience until Starbuck's; we've had cheap wine but nothing like Yellowtail wine. It can be done with technology. It can be done with a manipulation of the supply chain, such as Dell or Wal-Mart. In a Blue Ocean, the water is clear because there is no competition. That's what I believe Dynamic Envelope Creation can do for business leaders. It can make their red oceans blue again.

For the marketers I wanted to emphasize the targeted personalization right on the envelope that would revolutionize the direct mail game and bring transpromo mail to a whole new level. A simple bullseye could do that. And for the mail operations person I wanted to emphasize freedom from the pre-made envelope. As someone said to me once, "Anything--anything--to get away from stuffing an envelope." So I came up with the idea of being handcuffed by traditional insertion.

I hired Prinova to be my design firm.  I've worked with Prinova before and they are great people, very creative, up on the latest technology. They came up with a superb rendering of my scratchy notes and drawings, which I'll reproduce here: