Archive for June, 2010
Fourth of July Fireworks
Published: June 28, 2010
There’s a new reason to get a little bit weepy looking through the greeting card aisles.
It’s not the heart-warming poems on a Mother’s Day card, or tearful “atta-boys” for a first-born’s graduation.
There’s a new breed of multimedia electronic cards coming on the market that more closely resemble something you’d buy in a BestBuy store than at Hallmark.
Cards with recordable karaoke soundtracks. Cards with augmented reality links online. Cards with animated color LCD screens that display snappy vignettes from “Star Wars” about fatherhood – for Father’s Day. Cards with a sticker price of $10 to $30 and a do-not-recycle-with-the-newspaper warning on the back.
A mere “Thinking of You” card with a kitten-in-a-basket photo, these are not.
Perhaps it’s our HDTV-loaded culture that judges everything in dots-per-inch and megabits-per-second. Or perhaps this is an inevitable overture by cardmakers to the snap-and-post phone/camera/Facebook nation. But multimedia greeting cards are selling fast, and they’re well on the way to becoming standard, and expected.
“The more elaborate the electronics, the more people want them,” said Tim Carlin, owner of Sara’s Hallmark in south Tampa, Fla. Case in point: He first wondered about stocking audio cards the size of a clipboard that play “Bad to the Bone” with booming bass. Price: $9.99. “But they sell out fast as we can stock them.”
On one level, these cards represent the state of the art in an escalating arms race between rival superpowers of the greeting card industry: Hallmark and American Greetings.
With each passing holiday, these arch-enemies introduce new cards with more electronic features to one-up the other. Last Christmas season, American Greetings launched a card with an LCD screen and USB cord the giver plugs into a PC to upload personal photos – blurring the line between a greeting card and a digital picture frame.
Meanwhile, the retail industry remains tenaciously bleak, putting a pinch on card companies that operate stores in shopping centers and strip malls. So card companies are looking for thicker profits from each card sold, and investors who desire ever-more profit are closely watching for a payoff from electronic cards.
Multimedia cards also let a card company tap into the brand recognition of celebrities, shows and movies. Why not a “Twilight”-themed card for Halloween that stands out against a landscape of mere pumpkin-print paper cards? Why not a Lance Armstrong-themed video for congratulations greetings?
“What we’ve done is expand the world of communications,” said Shelly Lulow, creative director in the writing studio of American Greetings. “As people become more technologically savvy, they can communicate more than ever. And we’re finding technology is an important part of what we do as a business.”
Like it or not, these cards also come with an unexpected obligation for the recipient. And they may well become something of a squatter on the mantle piece.
For one, there’s the cost.
Etiquette author Jay Remer notes he used to spend 60 cents on a card when he was a kid.
“Now, when you go look at birthday cards, they can cost $5 apiece,” Remer said. “And you may not even get that person a $5 gift card for somewhere.”
When he thinks of exchanging a card, it’s merely a way to connect with someone, or acknowledge a milestone – a sign of friendship or love. If he receives a card from someone close, he may keep it indefinitely.
But as for electronic cards, “This has all gotten way out of hand,” he said, and it blurs the meaning of “gift.”
The elaborate production, cost and effort the giver invests into a multimedia card can pressure recipients to keep the card much longer than a generic birthday card.
“Here’s your gift,” he said, “I want you to listen to this message every week, forever. That’s not a gift. That’s a job.”
These cards also bring up another quandary. How long must recipients wait to throw out a card that Grandma loaded with a slide show of photos of the cousins’ last Christmas? What about a Father’s Day video card, like one from Hallmark for $30, that takes AA batteries. Even arbitrary one-week or one-year rules for birthday cards don’t seem to apply for a disposing of a silicon message.
“We just haven’t come up with any rules yet as a culture on this particular subject,” said Lizzy Post, direct descendant of etiquette icon Emily Post and author at the Emily Post Institute.
Post said she’s only received about 10 paper greeting cards that were meaningful enough to keep permanently. Will we all have shoe boxes full of cards with little LCD screens, she wonders?
Electronics like that can’t go in the paper recycling bin, and it seems a bit strange for card companies to tout their recycled paper cards while selling electronics, too, she said.
“Personally, I’d rather just e-mail something to a friend,” she said. “I don’t want to be sent some-thing in the mail and then have to bring it to an electronics store for recycling.”
If the message sent through multimedia is heartfelt, and happily received, then that’s all for the good, she said. But as for recycling electronics, “That’s just a pain.”
Readers, I’d like to hear from you. Tell me what you think about this movement in the greeting card industry.
Baskets by Consuela“we think outside the basket”
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