I came home on one of those freezing cold days last week when the thermometer read 12 degrees although it felt many times colder due to the wind chill. As I was thawing out, my wife mentioned that she had just purchased 13 weeks of the Philadelphia Sunday Inquirer. I thought it a little unusual as we have not subscribed to a newspaper for many years as we get our news these days on the internet. I have not missed those blackened hands that result from flipping through the Sunday news and I do not miss the piles of papers that accumulate waiting to be bound and taken out with the trash to be recycled. I must admit that I do miss the flavor of the hometown Sunday sports section, but I did not believe that my wife could have been aware of those feelings. I asked her, "What could have led you suddenly to subscribe to Sunday Inquirer?" She informed that there was a young Africa-American man who knocked on our door in this freezing weather and was not even wearing a winter coat. He explained that he was trying to put himself through college by selling subscriptions to the local paper. My wife looked at me at confessed, "I just had to buy the paper from him."
The next Sunday I was walking my dog through our suburban neighborhood just after a light snow had fallen the previous night. I smiled as I passed our recently delivered newspaper on the curb of our driveway in its blue plastic bag. As I walked, all of the sudden I noticed on this white blanket of snow throughout the neighborhood, a series of blue dots running up and down every street in the development. These blue bags were lying at the base of every driveway on every street. I was amazed at the success of this clever marketing strategy aimed to take advantage of the suburban guilt complex. I am not sure that this marketing plan will be successful in the long-term, but I can assure you that it has at least given the struggling newspaper industry a little breath of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment