Put this down as MarketingTech’s favourite campaign of the year so far.
For a company which sells cat litter in bulk, your audience are cat owners, right?
Yet Toronto-based Bulk Cat Litter Warehouse went one step further – and directly targeted cats with their latest direct mail campaign.
How? By spraying catnip over the mail.
The campaign was put together by Vancouver agency Rethink Canada with 13 cats used as test cases – Mona, Bella, Ommie, Jojo, Paul, Linus, Malo, Taika, Riley, Gracie, Prince Ruv, Bagheera and Pebble.
The results, as you’d expect, were both effective and adorable:
Marie Lunny, account manager at Rethink, worked on the project. She explained the client relationship came about due to a friend of someone at the agency – and the ball started rolling.
“We wanted to think of something to do for them that would get noticed, but could be done on a very small budget,” she told MarketingTech.
From ideation to creation the whole process took “a few months” – with the majority of time spent testing various catnips to get the right formula.
Lunny says the clients are ‘thrilled’ with the campaign’s success – 190,000 YouTube hits and counting – and while actual sales numbers aren’t to hand, feedback from customers ‘continues every day.’
“Traffic to the store has increased with lots of people even coming in with the catnip DM in hand,” she added.
Catnip, from the herb nepeta cataria, has a remarkable effect on cats, from the nepetalacone molecule binding to a cat’s olfactory receptors to produce sensations of euphoria, sedation and even arousal.
This could lead to thoughts the tactic employed by Rethink was underhanded. But as iO9 put it: “If a human exhibited these signs, we would likely be concerned, but most cat owners are comfortable with their feline’s recreational drug problem.”
From a marketer’s perspective, this campaign could also be seen as proof that in a technology-driven world, the direct mail angle isn’t dead yet.
Lunny added: “We think DM is still a viable option for a lot of small businesses – especially if it’s creative enough not to be thrown in the junk mail pile.”
Take a look at the highlights below. What do you make of the campaign?
