Creative effectiveness in door drop - examples from 2018

Written by Neal Dodd, member of the Print Council and Door Drop hub and director at The Letterbox Consultancy Ltd.

Lidl Moments

Considering brand positioning alongside direct response

During the first week of March, I received a range of unaddressed material through my letterbox – a water company, local takeaway outlets and an FMCG coupon.

The stand out item for me, however, was this 28-page booklet from Lidl.

Printed on high-quality paper, the front cover is colourful yet consistent, clearly branded and with a clear message about what the booklet contains. A distinctive ‘£5 off’ headline offer is noticeable and clear.

As someone who works in the industry, I am naturally more inclined to closely inspect unaddressed material that comes through the door, however I’m confident that the quality and weight of the item would draw consumers attention away from other items on their doormat and encourage people to open the booklet to explore it in more detail.

Inside the first page is a clear cut-out coupon, which some consumers may immediately be looking for, and so it seems well positioned!

The remainder of the booklet features recipes (with wine pairings), activities, gifts and chocolate products for Easter, and then further detail on wine available in store. Each page is well laid out with very impressive imagery, short & sharp copy, and to me, a real focus on high quality.

This isn’t a distribution that has been planned or implemented by my agency and so the strategy that underpins the activity is only something I can make assumptions about, however, I would feel confident about assuming some of the tactics employed here.

First of all, the quality of the item – physically, as well as the creative & copy – suggests to me a continuation (and perhaps enhancement) of their 2017 brand repositioning strategy; ‘Big on Quality, Lidl on Price’. It is designed in such a manner that you feel the products inside are of a high quality, yet clearly, the prices are affordable.

Secondly, as we might expect, there is a clear discount on offer to encourage new customers into the store, ensuring that the door drop can have an impact in the immediate days and weeks following the distribution, as well as forming part of their brand strategy. I am not convinced that the £5 voucher will be enough to drive interest from people who may not previously have considered visiting the store – particularly if, like myself, the resident is a 10-15 minute drive from the store – but I would interested to see the results and the concept is sound.

Ultimately, measuring the success of the drop should be left to those responsible for delivering against their brief, but if the objectives were to focus on the brand positioning described above, whilst helping to drive new customers into the store then I am confident that this piece will have ticked many of those boxes.

There are a few elements that I would question:

• The back cover features the Lidl brand but focuses exclusively on baby essential products. I found this a little confusing when compared with the other 27 pages, particularly when you consider that if this item landed face down on someone’s doormat then their first impression might not be what the creative team had envisaged when they put together the front cover.
• There is no mention of where my local Lidl store is located. Most people may well know, of course, however one might argue that if the objective of this drop is to encourage consumers not used to shopping at Lidl into the store, then this could be an important piece of information
• The coupon is valid from 5^th-18^th March. A door drop w/c 5^th March potentially gives consumers just eight days to redeem the coupon – possibly less, if snow or other factors had delayed the distribution. Is that enough?

Overall though, I felt very positive about the item when it came through the door and I hope that it worked well for the agency and client.

I feel it helps to highlight an important point about door drop marketing, in that many clients and agencies may sometimes rush to put together a leaflet that focuses on immediate response and results, forgetting the potential impact that the campaign has on the brand.

We now know, thanks to the recently launched JICMail, that door drops are revisited multiple times and offer a reach of more than just the person who picks up the item.

Door drops offer a unique opportunity to put a physical item in front of the consumer, when they are in the home, that they will pick up and look at. That offers value in brand awareness and positioning if utilised correctly, alongside the understandable desire for response.

If you think your door drop campaign successfully highlights door drop marketing then get your entries ready for the DMA Awards 2018 Door Drop Category - entries open 2 July 2018.