Bagging the Brown Bag

The message of the mailing, “Your gift multiplies 30 times to prevent food like this from going to waste …” is communicated on the outer.

The brown-bag mailing strongly featured images of children, while the grocery voucher places more emphasis on a broader demographic that includes the working poor and the elderly. When it was first tested against the brown-bag control, the average gift for the grocery-voucher mailing was high but the response rate was lower, Shoemaker says. Encouraged by the strong average gift and lower costs to get it out in the mail, A2H tweaked and tested everything from art, copy, offer and the number of coupons included in the mailing. Over time, the response rate for the grocery-voucher package increased. It performed well against the strong yet expensive brown-bag mailing, and it was mailed as a co-control for most of 2003.