I’ve always considered personal expression something best done by a greeting card. Okay, I’m outside the text mad demographic which our phone companies but, but I thought that for sending a birthday, congratulations or sympathy message a greeting card was the most appropriate medium. You can’t display a mobile phone or a computer screen on your mantelpiece after all.
I guess it is my ignorance which leads me to be surprised at how structured the online greetings business is. I have known about e-cards and the like for years but to find established greeting card companies so dominant in the text space is a surprise. Take American Greetings – they have a comprehensive mobile offering through their AG Interactive subsidiary. Their bold pitch is:
The international leader in personal expression content and solutions for the digital arena.
They cleverly attract the 18-24 demographic through a ring-tones business.
This is on my mind today because of data I have seen which underscores the importance of greeting cards to an average newsagency. It shows that more than half greeting card purchases in newsagencies are planned. That is, these consumers visit a newsagency with the purpose of purchasing a greeting card. Often, they purchase multiple.
If (when) consumers transition to communicating sentiments electronically as opposed to by greeting card then a pillar of a traditional newsagency suffers. Given the cross category dependence of newsagencies the impact on many would be significant. To slow such impact Australian newsagents and their greeting card suppliers ought to regularly invest in advertising to remind people about the pleasure sending and receiving greeting cards brings. Otherwise the success of the category will fade with the age of the population. While newsagents will consider this the such investment an obligation of their suppliers, they are wrong. Newsagents need to be financial stakeholders in any profile building campaign.