January - Snow, more snow and an MMC ‘hello’
Annual reviews have got to start somewhere - so why not with the weather? Storms, sleet and snow, snow, snow. The Gods threw the lot at us and at Royal Mail, which drafted in extra postmen and women and laid on Sunday deliveries to clear the backlog of parcels and letters and keep the mail running smoothly in the first weeks of 2011.
January also saw a new editor arrive at the MMC.co.uk, Clark Turner, first footed it into the world of direct mail and determined to boost the site's topical content and social media presence.
February - True love, travel and the reunion of Barbie and Ken
According to the UK's Greetings Card Association, we spend more on Valentine's Day cards than any other card we send. The price of this true love - on average £2.17.
In 2011 the most romantic day of the year fell on a Monday and marketers were urged by Google analyst Jonny Cranmer to be creative with their pricing and proposition to make the most of the romantic season.
With travel queries up 20% year on year, Cranmer focused firmly on the potential for travel firms to big up the opportunities for romantic breaks on the weekends preceding and following Valentine's Day.
In another beautifully pink moment Mattel chose Valentine's day 2011 to announce the rekindled romance of Barbie and Ken. In a youthful touch Barbie hinted that something might be in the works on her Facebook page with the status update: “Who knows…maybe I’ll have a Valentine this year.”
On 14 February her status changed to “In a relationship.” The pair were reunited as co-stars in ‘Toy Story 3’.
“As we like to put it, they found they were kind of missing each other,'” explains Lisa McKnight, vice president of marketing at Mattel. Is that the sound of church bells…? No, much nicer for Mattel, it's ringing tills.
March - A great big data exercise and a female first for the IPA
8 March 2011 saw 26 million households across England and Wales door dropped with Census questionnaires in time for Census Day on 27 March. The Government's data gathering exercise cost £482 million and saw 35,000 people out on the field, advising, counting, and collecting the filled-in questionnaires.
For the first time the Census included questions on civil partnerships, second homes and recent migration and managed to avoid the recognition of Jedi's as a religious race.
24 March was also a great day for women marketers as Nicola Mendelsohn, chairman and partner of Karmarama, was formally approved as the first female president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the first in the IPAs 94-year history.
April - Texting, taxes and a wonderful Royal Wedding
In April those clever Danes became known for more than great lager. Paying for postage entered the tech era with the launch of mobile postage. Instead of putting a physical stamp on their standard letter they can use their mobile phones to send a text to the post office, get a code in return and write it where the stamp should be.
April also saw the beginning of new business year with VAT hiked from 17.5% to 20%. First and second class stamped and franked mail plus parcels remained unaffected which saw marketers think again about direct mail in their marketing mix.
To celebrate the Wedding of Prince William and Katherine Middleton on 29 April, Royal Mail issued two official first class stamps making Prince William the first of the Queen's grandchildren to have his wedding commemorated on stamps.
May - A month of saturdays and digital watermarking takes DM hi-tech
May saw a big focus on the sixth day of the week. A set of US fundamentalist Christians told everyone that would listen that the world was going to end on Saturday 21 May. And Saturday became the new Tuesday thanks to new analysis from the Mail Media Centre on the best day to send marketing messages by mail.
Contrary to received direct marketing thinking sending mail for receipt at the end of week is a good thing especially where money and finances are concerned. Financial advertising mail that's received on Saturday is more likely to be read in depth than on any other day.
In a move that gazumped barcodes and QR codes Royal Mail's door to door team launched digital watermarks in partnership with Digital Space. Promising no impact on the design or layouts, digital watermarks offer brands sending direct mail the opportunity to link to deeper content online and truly take their message multi-channel.
June - Olympic tickets and the Kate-effect on the written word
The buzz surrounding the London 2012 Olympics began in earnest as those who'd applied for tickets got news of their allocations.
Two months on from her wedding, even the Wimbledon tennis tournament fell under the influence of the Kate-effect with officials displaying a thank you letter written by the Duchess of Cambridge for their hospitality after a visit in 2008.
In the retail space, stationery sales increased, especially to young people with John Lewis reporting a 79% sales hike in writing paper, and thank you note sales jumping 20%.
July - Panorama rekindles the junk mail debate and a 168-year-old tabloid folds
The direct mail industry came under fire with the airing of Panorama's 'Why hate junk mail' programme on BBC 1. The show promised to lift the lid on the so-called ‘junk mail’ industry, but fell into the tabloid media’s default position of ill-informed criticism that failed to distinguish junk and scam mail from legitimate advertising mail.
Anticipating widespread media interest in the story, the DMA undertook a PR campaign to keep its members informed of what to expect and provided them with a factsheet outlining the facts and figures about direct mail to help them answer questions from concerned clients and employees.
“The major thing Panorama missed out was the benefits of direct mail to consumers. They had a view that 100% of consumers view mail as a deluge, yet BMRB research reveals shows that 75% of consumers like receiving special offers and vouchers by mail,” says DMA’s chief executive, Chris Combemale.
July also say the world of newspapers say farewell to a 168-year-old redtop as the public and MPs' focus on phone hacking refused to go away. ‘The News of the World’published its last issue on 11 July following an advertising boycott by big brands which saw more than £8m in annual ad spend pulled in just 24 hours.
August - London riots and localisation
Holiday season. Time to slap on the sun cream and celebrate all that summer in the city offers. But instead of enjoying the sunshine, key parts of North and South London became protest hotspots, with looters and rioters causing havoc from Croydon to Tottenham.
6 August 2011 was the busiest day of 2011 for bbc.co.uk with 15.9 million unique browsers logging on to find on which parts of London were affected. Social media played its part for both riot perpetrators and law enforcement in ways which echoed Managing Director of EMO, Nick Davies opinion piece on the strengths of localisation.
“By engaging consumers with what’s happening on their doorstep, the chances of a brand not only holding consumer attention but prompting action are significantly higher. It’s a strategy that not only identifies the problem but surmounts it, and engages an audience on a street-by-street basis, something national messaging cannot do with the same degree of geo-demographic relevance,” said Davies.
September - Ho ho ho, it's christmas catalogue season already
Autumn is upon us and for e-tailers and retailers alike Christmas is already front of mind. This is the month when the greatest number of catalogues are mailed according to The Direct Commerce Catalogue Index and if we gauge Johnny Boden as a Bellwether for the e-tail sector, then home shopping is booming.
The company saw a 13% rise in profits to £32.5 million last year, thanks in no small part to its marketing teams innovative attitude to direct mail which saw personalised love story mailers, a newspaper format catalogue and the APA award winning '1000 little things.'
As the awards season hots up Clark Turner joins the DMA judging panel and the Royal Mail puts the Olympics front of mind by asking participants of the ‘Young Letter Writer 2011' competition to tell them “What the Olympics means to me.”
And finally, never one to miss a marketing opportunity Hallmark cards launch a range of sympathy cards for the newly unemployed.
October - 5 October 2011 So long Steve Jobs, visionary, apple co-founder and inspiration to marketers everywhere
Steve Jobs on Thinking differently: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
November - black Friday, cyber Monday. However you say it, it's retail sales
Friday 25 November and Monday 28 November 2011 are now key dates in any e-tailers diary. For the days on either side of the last weekend in November vie for the title of busiest online shopping day of the year. UK online sales rose by a fifth on Cyber Monday, according to the first figures.
Figures from IBM showed that online retail sales on Monday November 28 were 21.5% above the same Monday in 2010. And retailers take note, m-commerce has a growing part to play in the sales bonanza.
IBM’s figures, gathered through its Coremetrics Benchmark analysis, showed a three-fold growth in mobile traffic on November 28, which rose to 12% of all traffic, while transactions through mobile devices rose to 9.8% of all sales.
December - sales and marketers unite?
There's no doubt about it, 2011 has been a newsworthy and belt-tightening year. To top it all the CIM predicts that sales and marketing departments will merge sooner rather than later much to the industry's chagrin. What will 2012 bring - the Games, a Diamond Jubilee, with an upturn in fortunes?
Find out what the great and the good of the marketing world predict for 2012 in the first week of January. Until then - Happy Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Happy New Year.