Michele Rick

Direct mailers test creative in the mail, always trying to “beat” the control package. In our business, each new catalog needs to look sufficiently different from the last, while still adequately portraying brand image. You need to keep things fresh, but you also have to guard against pushing your brand too far. If you’re only in the mail once with a cover, how do you achieve this? At Crutchfield, an home and car electronics catalog, we test our covers by showing them to panels of different customer segments before we test them in the mail. By doing this, Crutchfield gets timely “winner”/”loser” information on the best cover