Snickers.  Tide Detergent.  Cheerios.

What images do these branded products conjure up?  A candy bar, sure.  How about the color of the packaging?  Brown for Snickers, red for Tide, yellow for Cheerios.

You may not even be a candy bar consumer and yet it’s likely you have a reasonably good recall of what the Snickers packaging looks like.  If I blurred out the name but preserved the size, shape and color scheme the percentage of consumers – in market for candy or OUT – would be very high.

What is the point you ask?  The point is that your direct mail control package should be more like Snickers and less like the generic chocolate bar on the left in the illustration above.  There are, in fact many an example of non-profits who have built a Snickers bar control product but ONLY by default, never with that intent.  The default version arrives when they find themselves with a control after 5, 15, 20 years of trying ‘to beat the control’ through testing that wastes massive amounts of money and time. Why?  Because unknowingly they’re fighting against the very thing they should covet – a well established, branded product.

You see, the packaging IS PART of the brand.  In fact, it is far more important than the actual product, which chemically, taste-wise,  and texture-wise is far more similar than different from the generic version.

It’s unfortunate that FundraisingDirect Mail seems to covet the opposite – the new look, the latest hook, the best way to trick the donor (e.g. silly teaser copy on OE, leaving the organizational logo off) into opening the package.  This is not being a marketer, salesperson or fundraiser.  This is the approach of a a charlatan.

Why do direct mail fundraisers test so much to try and beat their packaging while the consumer package goods industry does not?  One major reason is the lack of appreciation or understanding of “brand” among the former.  In the fundraising and non-profit world “brand” too often sits in the silly world of “tagline”, “logo” and, if budget permits, an ad campaign or two.   The reality of brand is that every non-profit has an organizational and product level (i.e. direct mail package) brand even if it goes unattended to, misunderstood and unappreciated.

Another massively important requisite for building brands , particularly in direct mail, is understanding the value of the non-responder.  And I’m sure with that observation comes the collective eye roll of many in direct response who live and die exclusively by response rate.

Today’s non-responder is often tomorrow’s responder or tomorrow’s lapsed reactivation.  Building and establishing brand equity (this is financial with future lifetime value, not some soft and fuzzy crap) with the non-responder is RADICALLY more important than response rate.  Response rate is about the extreme outlier – the responder, the 1%.  The non-responder, the 99%, is far more important if only because it is nearly 100 times larger in size.

We’ve written plenty about what brand is and the value (financial – this ain’t soft and fuzzy) of it here and proof of the value of the non-responder here.

So let’s focus on the non-profit’s product brand – i.e. the direct mail package.  Why the obsession with beating the control?  Why the obsession with testing?  Does anybody understand what the control represents?  It represents your default product brand.  Default because very few if any nonprofits ever talk about the establishment of a branded product when talking about direct mail packaging.  The conversation revolves around “best practices” and wanting to do “the nickel package” because everybody else in a given sub-sector is using it – health sector in this example.

You know what the “nickel package” is? A branded product.  The vendor who owns this product worked very hard to productize and brand that tactical look and feel and is reaping the rewards of their consistency in not deviating from the PRODUCT when selling it to Org 1….10….20.  Kudos to them.

But you know what the individual organization who uses the nickel package has?  A commoditized, generic product that by default, becomes the control and the “branded” thing to beat.

Why do you think the control is so tough to beat?  Why are there so many examples of controls that have been in existence for 5, 10, 20 years despite hundreds of tests trying to beat it?  The answer is quite simple. The control is hard to beat because you’ve established – by DEFAULT – a branded product whose brand includes the packaging.  This is by default because chances are it was not created with intent or purpose to become the product brand.  If it were with intent or purpose you’d not waste countless dollars and hours trying to beat it.  Instead, you’d be Snickers or Tide or your own, unique, and differentiated version of the nickel package.

“But what about donor fatigue?” you ask?    If you use “donor fatigue”  as an argument or rationale for package changes then you are in the charlatan business.  Why doesn’t Snickers or Tide talk about consumer fatigue?  It doesn’t exist.  If it did, the control wouldn’t be in place for 5, 10, 20 years.

I can hear it now: “But we aren’t like consumer goods, we don’t have the same relationship, the same demand, the same touchpoints, the same whatever.”  Bullshit.

Let’s focus on candy, the ultimate impulse buy.  Nobody has candy on the shopping list.  There is a reason that candy bars and gum are generally located as point of sale items near the cash register or checkout counter.  Buying candy is very analogous to charitable giving in that folks aren’t banging down your door to give, you usually have to ask for it (a lot).  You aren’t asking more than the Snickers people though.  They are out there every single day with their ask, up against an equally crowded field and equally desperate for shelf space (think mail box) and mindshare.  And yet, they don’t feel the need to change that distinctive, recognizable packaging.

What Snickers and any other well-branded consumer company will often do is launch another product to meet a different need or target a different consumer segment.  This is the business non-profits should really be in.  In fact, it is the business they are in even if it goes unrealized.   The nonprofit that understands and practices this will be light years ahead of its competitors and enjoy the financial performance that comes from building differentiated product brands WHILE saving a ton of $  in the process by not trying to beat its well branded product and instead, launch the next one.

To address the other lurking thought out there, no this is not just provocative theory that never gets applied.  Product development work is occurring in the sector.  It happens far more in the UK than the states – far, far more.   Product development requires thinking about the 4P’s – price, product, positioning and placement (we add two more, People and Process to the mix) – and adhering to any number of well-defined ways to learn, build, launch and modify.  Products might include a monthly giving product, a midlevel product, a ceremonial adoptive animal product, a high end premium product, event product etc…

We’ve built these for charities; it works (or should) the exact same way as building a consumer package goods product.  And if built correctly with the stated goal of a well differentiated, branded product then the folly of “conversion” from one product to another (read more on this here) and the idea of quickly establishing a baseline control only so we can get to the testing phase to try and beat it goes away.

Reality is your charity has plenty of product brands right now; the vast majorities just aren’t any good because that was never the stated goal.  The good news is it doesn’t need to be this way and if you step out from the crowd of generic candy you can wind up with a Snickers.