electronics

Vistaprint Sells Business Cards With Emotion

Vistaprint, maker of collateral and promotional materials for small businesses, is taking a more emotional approach highlighting its essential nature, rather than emphasizing deals and discounts. 

The new television campaign tells the story of a family-owned bakery (“Barrett & Son”) as it grows. The spot begins with a young man viewing a postcard celebrating the bakery’s anniversary. The visuals then shift to show a man and his young son executing the bakery’s business — mixing dough, making deliveries, and promoting the store with signs, flyers, postcards, and business cards.

In a three-minute version of the spot online, the bakery becomes more successful and the young man grows up and moves on to an office job in a faraway city, revealing him to be the same one going through the mail at the beginning of the commercial. The young man returns home to his father to be greeted with business cards — stowed away in the past — declaring the son owner of the bakery. “Everything you create matters,” reads onscreen text to close the spot. 

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“Vistaprint has been serving the micro-business market for 20 years and we’ve come to truly understand our customers. So we set out to make an ad that really resonates with them,” Bridget O’Brien, Vistaprint’s vice president of brand and communications, tells Marketing Daily. “We knew we had to tell a story that connected with viewers on both a business and personal level.”

The approach marks a change in strategy for the company, which had previously tilted toward direct-response commercials. This new spot, O’Brien says, is the first in the company’s history to not include offers or discounts. The campaign is part of a concerted effort by the company to take credit for improvements in areas such as quality, pricing, experience and channel communications, she says. 

“Our target audience has expanded to include business owners who require more product and quality options and have larger marketing budgets,” O’Brien says. “We want micro-business owners to feel positive about the Vistaprint brand and consider us first when they think about purchasing. We have very high awareness and consideration but we lag in trial due to the perception that we have low quality.”

The campaign was developed by Vistaprint’s in-house agency. The commercial will run more than 8,000 times in February in the U.S. and will continue through 2015. The commercial also marks the launch of a wider North American brand campaign that will include display advertising, social media, content marketing and PR. 

“Everything is all laddering up to ‘everything you create matters,’” O’Brien says. “More specifically, PR and content will focus on extending the impact and message of the broadcast campaign and driving views of the director’s cut of the ad, which truly tells the whole story. Display advertising will focus on more of the functional reasons to believe, as a compliment to the more emotional broadcast campaign.”

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