Purrsonalisation at its best
Having recently become the obedient servant to a rescue cat (yes, cats don’t have owners, they have staff), I am naturally besotted with my new furry companion. So one recent piece of direct mail that dropped through my letter box particularly grabbed my attention.
Always an admirer of the creative cross media marketing strategies deployed by the John Lewis Partnership and Waitrose, in one fell swoop this particular item powerfully demonstrated the value of customer data if cleverly curated, and the commercial clout of personalised transpromotional print.
Having recently subscribed to the pet insurance offered by the group, and as a My Waitrose loyalty card carrier, they had cleverly put two and two together and surmised that, as a new cat owner, I might well be rather interested in trialling different sorts of cat food, treats and other feline paraphernalia.
Hence a personalised mailing, with a selection of personalised money-off vouchers linked to my loyalty account, as well as a discount voucher driving me to waitrosepet.com, a dedicated website as yet unfamiliar to me, but positioning itself as ‘the convenient way to feline fulfilment’.
The mailer promises me the option to subscribe to regular email updates in which they’ll ‘send me and my cat regular emails’ to alert us to special offers and new products, thus closing the promotion-purchase-engagement-loyalty loop and keeping me coming back for more. They obviously have me down as a mad cat lady already.
Now my dilemma is simply whether Tigger should have a dedicated email address and – being an extraordinarily intelligent and manipulative creature – how quickly he will master the QWERTY keyboard and start sending me email reminders to unlock the catflap.