Guest Column: Nourishing The Forgotten Child Of Retail Marketing: How To Make The Most Of Your Flyer Power

By Joe Thacker and Manu Sarna

If TV and radio advertising are a call to emotion, flyers are a call to action. Flyers are a retailer's one opportunity for a weekly dialogue with consumers, and, at the Saturday morning breakfast table, you'd better make your voice heard. Note that we call it a dialogue, not monologue like TV or radio advertising. It's a chance for a one-on-one engagement with no distractions for just a handful of minutes or even a few seconds. The sole objective is to make the consumer profitably visit your store more than they would have without the flyer. Make those minutes and seconds of a dialogue count.

Consider the flyer dialogue in these terms: as a retailer you first have to decide which consumers you're going to pay a visit to via a flyer. When are you going to visit? How often? Distribution is not just how many houses you visit, but how often and when during the year. Let's say you've chosen your target houses and you're lining up with about 9 other retailers on the doorstep of a consumer on Saturday morning. The consumer opens the door and invites a few of you in to join him at the breakfast table for about eight minutes; the rest he points towards the blue recycling box.