Is Hallmark’s move into the personalised card business driven by strategy or are they just late to the party?
Nothing says “I don’t really care” like an e-card. After their initial novelty veneer wore thin, the e-card became confined to businesses who wanted to trumpet 1) that they can save money by donating to charity but really can’t be bothered 2) that they are now taking a low-carbon approach but really can’t be bothered or 3) that their MD received one from his son (who couldn’t be bothered) and who thinks it represents the future. Of not being bothered.
Just hours after installing the new super one hour photo developing machine, everbody’s grandmother went digital consigning vast towers of squeaky paper and “leather” bound photo albums to the warehouse of oddities last seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Suddenly we could all take as many rubbish photos as we liked without some sixteen year old slapping a sticker on our faces telling us to do better.
Websites such as Photobox (Flickr capitalised late on this) sprang up to turn those digital files back into “product” and find a use for all the paper we thought we’d saved.
There are, of course, lessons to be learned from the e-card and the sudden collapse of entire film-to-print industry. We clearly wanted to carry on taking photos and share them with family and friends. We also enjoyed the freedom to “get creative” with our work. Especially when it came to personalisation.
Which is exactly what Moonpig saw and capitalised on to great effect. From out of nowhere came a brand with no real world value. Moonpig just created a great product at the right price and it caught on.
It must have caught the stalwarts of the greeting card industry by surprise. Just as Kodak were caught out by the rapid take-up of digital, so were Hallmark and their heavyweight counterparts. To the outside observer they seemed unfazed by Moonpig’s success even though it was clear from the start that this was an idea which would grow and grow.
Unfazed or calm.
Business strategy is a difficult beast to pin down. Those of us who press our noses up against the windows of other businesses like to weigh in on the decisions made by marketers.
I’m no exception.
Often it’s a good exercise, a sort of what-would-I-do thought experiment that sharpens the mind. Or distracts from real work.
In the case of Moonpig, I’ve often wondered why the big boys didn’t jump all over them immediately. They have the resources to protect their business on and off-line so were they being slow and out of touch with the way the Internet was shaping business or did they have a much larger strategy at hand?
We’ll never truly know of course and perhaps it doesn’t even matter because what they have established looks pretty good. It will appeal to the “rest” of us who are slower to adopt new ideas. Those of us who waited for Boots to begin processing digital films again.
The gut reaction (from what I’ve heard) is that Hallmark were just slow to react, caught with their pants down. And I’d be happy to go along with that if I wasn’t regularly having to think different about what my own industry perceives as good and bad packaging.
Because I don’t think it’s that simple. And thinking like this makes me want to look at things differently.
I can see a good business case for Hallmark waiting. Their name and reputation wasn’t going to disappear overnight and so, if they were fazed by the Internet explosion, it didn’t need to matter too much. They could afford to wait. They could afford to let Moonpig take all the risk, spend all the money and get people used to the concept of ordering and personalising cards online. After all, it’s an approach which works well for Apple who often wait to see how people access new technologies before jumping in and “innovating”.
Hallmark are now advertising on TV. They are doing it in a very “Moonpig” sort of way but with the Hallmark brand. If they go the whole… hog… then they should tie in deals with Boots and use their stores to carry the message back out into the real world where its customer base still live and shop.
It’s great to see people writing about our industry, but it’s not just the big boys that provide the service of personalised greeting cards. There are a number of new companies such as ours offering some great unique designs from the in-house design team, so it’s worth shopping around. Funky Pigeon also offers personalised calendars, posters and notebooks and regularly runs discount promotions on affiliate sites and by social networking with customers on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Many of our customers have previously bought from Moonpig, but have been delighted with the quality of our products, and also our service, our cards are posted from mainland UK, and not the Channel Islands. Customers should choose carefully when making online purchases and consider whether they wish to place their business with a company which is exempt from paying UK VAT, in a time when our economy needs all the support it can get from businesses. It is estimated that ecommerce companies operating from the Channel Islands cost the UK approx £110million in 2008 alone.
That’s not really what the article is about Richard. It’s not who the players are but the business decisions behind entering into a particular market. Spam notwithstanding however, you do raise other issues which you might want to blog about – namely the cost of doing business in the UK. It’s an interesting issue, especially in the face of globalisation.