FLORSHEIM INTERNATIONAL: ON THE RIGHT FOOT

Pity the poor news editor, buried by a daily stream of press releases. Whether mailed, e-mailed or faxed, many messages get lost in the mound that piles up on the desk of the average editor or producer. To stand out from this pile of plain vanilla publicity, the Lighton Colman agency decided a direct approach using wave mailings was needed if its client Florsheim International was going to get any notice.

“We told Florsheim to treat the press as you would a direct marketing audience,” says Brooke Lighton, co-founder/principal of Lighton Colman. “Hit them three times in the mail, and you will drive response up.”

The Chicago-based agency’s proposal for the product launch of the company’s Comfortech shoe line was a novelty for Florsheim, one of the last shoe manufacturers based in the U.S. While Florsheim sells other high-fashion shoes within some of its stores, and also sells private label lines to Kenneth Cole and Josef Abboud, its core products are conservative. Earlier campaigns had emphasized shoe fashions and the company’s name, but had done little to sell the benefits of the shoes. While the Comfortech name had been used by the company for years, it was introducing products with entirely new engineering and looks in the spring of 1998. “We very much wanted to change our image and very much wanted to get noticed,” explains Kirt Mancuso, marketing director for Florsheim International. Comfort was a crucial message, and the company wanted to loosen up its image.

Instead of the standard PR approach proposed by the other firms pitching the account (press releases to newspaper and radio, as well as some sort of staged event), Lighton Colman presented a package of two postcards followed by a press kit. “We think we have a very special product, and Lighton Colman went about delivering it in a special way,” Mancuso says.

“We thought since editors are consumers, too, they might like to see something different,” explains Lori Colman.

Following a strategy that emphasized Florsheim’s traditional benefits of comfort and reliability, with an atypical dash of humor, the postcards acted as teasers for the media kit. The cards featured sepia-tinted retro photos and the headlines “Pinched piggies?” and “Tired dogs?” Funky typefaces and electronically altered images (picture shoe tips stretched out like Pinochio’s nose) added to the fun of the design. No specifics were given about the Comfortech line, just a promise of more news to come from Florsheim.

The response from the 150 editors and producers who received the mailings was enthusiastic. “We had reporters calling us even before they got the press kit. In fact, some reporters were so intrigued that-although there was no 800 number or contact information on the postcards-they got through to Florsheim’s marketing people and then through to us,” Lighton says. “Editors said they’d never before received a press kit in this way,” Colman recalls.

The agency’s mailing list was a compilation of media contacts provided by Florsheim, primarily shoe fashion editors and industry trade magazines, and contacts Lighton Colman believed were logical additions to receive messages about foot comfort.

“The appeal of the Comfortech line is with the guys who are going with casual dress, the Casual Friday look that has gone to five days a week,” Colman says. “It also appeals to men who are on their feet all day, whether they are traders, sales reps or doctors.” So the agency added several medical magazines and sales management publications to its list, as well as leading outlets in the consumer press.

As a result of the campaign, some 40% of the editors and producers contacted have reported on Comfortech’s re-engineering. Several newspaper and radio syndicates have picked up the story, and the trade press has covered the relaunch extensively. At press time, the agency is waiting to confirm story placement in one of the major business weekly magazines.

“We’re still seeing results from the campaign,” Mancuso says. Florsheim is pleased with the results, he says, because, “We got press without doing a great deal, without staging an event, without unnecessary hype.”

In fact, one of the challenges Lighton Colman faced was running the Comfortech direct mail effort as a stand-alone. “Florsheim isn’t running much national media right now, so we haven’t been able to tie this in with an ongoing effort by the company,” Colman says. “So this technique has had to work harder than it would have if it were tied in with a larger campaign.”

And yet, she says, Florsheim has never before received as much attention for a campaign as it did from the Pinched piggies/Tired dogs effort. “While we’d like to say we executed a fully integrated campaign, Florsheim only authorized us to go so far in promoting the Comfortech line. They and we agreed that direct mail was the best way to get maximum attention from the press. We didn’t have the help of national advertising, so direct mail had to carry the weight of the whole campaign.”

Lighton Colman provides direct marketing services for clients such as stereo manufacturer Bang and Olafson and discount chain Service Merchandise. Its experience in database profiling, strategic development, direct mail and direct response advertising in both TV and print have all fed the Florsheim effort.

For followup, the agency has prepared a Comfortech TV spot for use by Florsheim’s stores and local dealers. It has also recommended that the company launch a consumer direct mail campaign, using its transactional database to target customers fitting the Comfortech profile. After all, there are a lot of pinched piggies out there.