Editors’ Choice Award Winner: Sampling and Promotional
GlossyGreetings
by Cargo Cosmetics
When it comes to brand promotion, Cargo Cosmetics’ GlossyGreetings is the gift that keeps on giving. Launched as a limited-edition promotional item for the 2005 holiday season, GlossyGreetings are cards and gift tags, each of which contains a unit-dose blister of Cargo’s lip gloss. Beyond providing customers a unique way to adorn gift wrap, they also serve as a brilliant marketing tool for Cargo.
Cargo Cosmetics president Hana Zalzal says that she decided to launch GlossyGreetings after Cargo launched its DailyGloss product in 2004. (DailyGloss features unit-dose blisters of lip gloss that allow customers to travel with as little or as much gloss as they desire.) “After we launched DailyGloss, I thought that GlossyGreetings would be another great way for customers to share our lip glosses with their friends,” says Zalzal. “We give out cards and tags with gifts anyway, so why not make them a little better, a little more useful, and a little more special?”
“I think this is so clever,” says awards panelist Lisa Carroll, group creative director for Coty Inc. “I would definitely use them and send them out. I think they are really fun and definitely memorable. You can’t not like them.”
Panelist Maiken Erstad, design director for Dragon Rouge, agrees. “If one of your customers puts these on all her Christmas gifts for her friends and family, you have just extended your brand promotion to another five or
ten people. If this were just a card with a little blister in it, which I’ve seen a hundred times, it would be dull. But the fact that they coordinated the look of the blister with the graphics on the cards makes them that much more appealing.”
Sample packaging supplier Klocke of America produced the blisters. Klocke provided the filled blisters to Cargo, which then attached them to the cards and tags. “To our knowledge, Cargo was the first to supply a blister to the market in this format,” says Don Hopta, Klocke’s vice president of sales and marketing. “Anytime you can get your product into customers’ hands is effective marketing. Cargo’s use of the blister in a retail form also allowed them to defer the costs of sampling while still getting their product out.”
Zalzal says that production was simple for the most part. “Technically, we did not run into any difficulties,” she says. “When we put the gloss into the card, we had to ensure that we did not exceed the weight for regular postage, so we had to play with the manufacturing and gauge of the card stock.”
Although GlossyGreetings essentially makes customers the conduit for promoting the Cargo brand, the company’s motives are altruistic. Cargo donated 100% of the proceeds from the sales of GlossyGreetings to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital charity, making GlossyGreetings a rewarding gift all around.