Alas, the package that arrived for me yesterday wasn’t a new book or PS3 game as my wife had suggested in the car on the way home. It was the first (post pilot) edition of Matter instead. After the initial disappointment had subsided (Mirror’s Edge has just been completed you see) I set about having a little look.
Matter, if you’ve not heard of it, is a Royal Mail product designed to make direct mail a bit more appealing. Essentially it’s a collection of advertiser freebies sent together to a user-registered mailing list.
Says the Royal Mail:
“Matter is a collection of interesting/amusing/unusual/useful objects created by a handful of companies. The objects are gathered together in a distinctive box and delivered to your home on a Saturday morning. Uniquely, Matter controls what goes in the box, working with the companies to make sure the items are worth paying attention for. They aren’t allowed to stick any old rubbish in the box”
Hmmm. We’ll see about that.
Aside from two minor fails – it’s absolutely positively supposed to arrive on a Saturday morning to coincide with our fabled ‘leisure time’ (it arrived on a less than leisure-driven Monday) and you’re supposed to get an email heralding its arrival (I didn’t) – it’s actually not as terrible as it could be. We got a DVD from Diageo, a chocolate bar from Cadbury, a sim pack from O2, an excerpt of a book that looks a bit rubbish (in fairness that opinion’s based entirely on the title and the cover), some Source shower gel and a few other odds and sods. Douglas Jnr seemed quite interested in it all at least.
It’s all OK I suppose. It’s nice getting fun stuff through the post. It reduces the capital cost of sampling physical products/samples through the post for advertisers. It contemporises Royal Mail (a little bit). And the idea of ‘physical in a digital world’ is, if I do say so myself, quite a nice positioning (disclaimer: I worked very closely on the origination of this idea a couple of years ago). I guess the whole thing ultimately rests on the quality of the stuff that’s included. I’d rate this little lot at about 6/10. Alright, but could be better…
I’d also be interested to see how they plan to measure its success. I suspect Royal Mail are pitching this largely as a combo brand/response vehicle and, depending on the sample, it probably fits somewhere between the two. Let’s see what happens.
hector 