The Envelop Story

Well, in one of the marketing conference, and one of the speakers told this interesting story which i really liked, Ofcourse it is related to marketing, but probably you can apply this to real life.

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There was a certain airline company say HiFly airlines, which used to consume about 1 million of envelops every year. They used envelops to communicate to customers their tickets, offers, new flight informations, frequent flyer programs and so on etc. At start of each year they used to float a tender, asking for proposals (pricing) from envelop companies for that years quantities,  and then as it happens the contract goes to lowest bidder.

So this was just a pure price game, there was not much of options for the envelop companies other than to put the best possible deal they could afford and hope for the best.

But one envelop company tried to do it differently. They approached the HiFly airlines and said that they would like to do research on the envelop usage in their company. They wanted to find out, for what purposes the envelop were used, how many people respond back, sizes of envelops used  and so on. Envelop company told HiFly that it was just some extra work that they were willing to do purely from research point of view. The airline people did not find any problem in this, and they allowed the research to be done.

In course of research the Envelop company found the following,

1. Most of the envelops that went out were for  frequent flyer program, and offers for free flights. 

2. About 80% of the people never opened those envelops.

Considering this observations the Envelop company suggest to airlines that for frequent flyer they should be designed differently. They should  be windowed envelops, and top of envelop should be printed like this,

You are 

[3] (Through the window)

Flights away from getting a free flight (something as in below picture)

Apart from this the envelop company gave quite a few other suggestions as to how to make envelops more attractive, and more tempting for people to see it.

Airline company really liked these suggestions and on trial run, they really found out that it substantially increased their responses to their otherwise mostly unread envelops.

After this Airline company got rid of the tender process. They joined hands with the this particular envelop company, to provide them with envelops and to also do frequent analysis on their usage and suggest changes.

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I really liked this story, because most times, we dont take initiatives or do more work, not because we dont want it, but most times  because uncertainity clouds us. But sometimes I guess we have to do stuff, with genuine interest, and without bothering about rewards,

rewards come, maybe little later but they do.