The orange hand print & other direct marketing tales

During a brainstorming session, Impiric creative director Herb Skelton painted his left hand orange, ING Life’s corporate color, and placed it on a sheet of paper in front of him. "We were looking at something with an exclamation point to it,’ he said.

Skelton got what he was looking for.

ING Life handed out 1.3 million of the orange hand print stickers from May to September this year. "It was hard to distribute the first 300,000 stickers. Then, we tied up with the gas stations of Shell, which is also a Dutch company like us, and we never seemed to have enough stickers around," said ING Life marketing project manager Pie Ortigoza.

ING Life’s orange hand print stickers have since found their way to the rear windshields of all sorts of vehicles. In some cases, a couple of fingers have been chopped off either to make a political statement (such as the "L" of former President Aquino or the "V" of former President Ramos) or to express the state of the economy (with only the middle finger left).

"It didn’t matter who we gave the stickers to, whether it was to a tricycle driver or to a car owner. Our purpose was to gain market awareness. We wanted the general public to at least know our name when our agents made a call. Given the traffic situation here, our stickers were seen and were noticed," said ING Life first vice-president for sales and marketing Arjan Bol.

Hand-in-hand with the sticker campaign, ING Life ran a promotion which gave away P1 million each to four winners, one from Metro Manila and one each from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. For easier identification and because they, too, could win a prize, some gas stations put their name on the palm of the hand print stickers.

"It was unheard of to do a promotion before a brand is well established. But it worked in this campaign," said Impiric client services director Damian Byrne.

Effective

ING Life is a global client of the Wunderman Co., which was founded in the 1950s by one of the pioneers of direct marketing, Lester Wunderman. In Asia, Wunderman Co. is called Impiric.

"In most competitive markets like life insurance, it is important to think outside the box. Because life insurance companies are risk-averse, their traditional advertising focused on protection," said Bol. "I wanted something different but I didn’t have that much money."

Bol, who has been in the country for less than a year, opted for direct marketing, which is more cost effective than traditional or branded advertising because there is a measurable response or call to action from the part of the targeted market.

At the end of the campaign, Impiric places the response for the sticker campaign at over 200%. There has been an noticeable increase in ING Life’s business since May, although Bol is careful not to place the entire credit on the orange handprint sticker campaign. "It is a combination of an well-executed campaign and of the internal training of our people," he said.

Ortigoza, whose calling card carries the orange handprint as a company logo, however, said the orange handprint is currently being registered as an ING Life trademark with the country’s Intellectual Property Office. ING Life subsidiaries in Korea and Europe have shown interest in running similar campaigns.

ING Life, which took over Aetna in 1996, currently ranks tenth among the country’s 40 insurance companies in terms of new business premiums.

Cost efficient

In the Philippines, a full direct marketing campaign can be run for P500,000.

Cost per response is about P250.

This was the approximate budget of Ford Motor Group Phils. for a two-phased fleet mailing campaign. In the first phase, 20,000 postcards carrying the resume or bio-data of selected Ford vehicles were mailed out. In the second phase, those who responded were sent more detailed information.

For Ford’s first mailing batch, Impiric places the response rate at 30%, higher than the average local response rate of 10%. In the United States, the average response rate is 3%, in large part because the mailing list or the target market is significantly larger than the one used in the Philippines.

To further increase the response rate, Impiric has had to make adjustments to the Philippine market.

For example, Filipinos are more likely to fill up a survey form that takes 30 seconds or less to complete. Filipinos are also more likely to tick off a multiple-choice rather than a fill in the blank survey. Filipinos will definitely not give out financial information. They would also ask how they got into the mailing list.

To date, Impiric has an in-house data base of 300,000 names and addresses. When necessary, it buys mailing lists from three to four companies at P3 to P4 a name. When used for a client’s campaign, the list becomes the property of the client, not of Impiric.

"We’re very careful about whom we purchase the mailing lists from," Bryne said. "We have a policy of asking the seller if he is authorized to sell the list and if he got the data in a good way. We continue to deal with companies which have given us quality response from using their lists."

Not all lists are equal. For example, a mailing list of Forbes Park may not be useful if it is not updated.

Equally important is how the mailing list is used. The lack of response may be due to the targeting of the wrong market. For example, where a consumer lives also demonstrates differences in priorities. An expatriate living in one of the Makati villages will probably be married and will have different priorities from an expatriate living in a Malate townhouse who is will probably be single.

"Historically, there’re more demand for direct marketing when times get hard," said Bryne, who has had 11 credential meetings this month compared to the average four meetings a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in New York. "Companies still have to sell the same products but they now have to sell it at the least cost. In direct marketing, a company knows exactly how many people have responded and who these people are."

That is true for local companies as well as for multinational companies. Impiric is betting on it.