Repetition is a Good Thing

Repetition is a good thing.
Repetition is a good thing.
Repetition is a good thing.

See what I did there?

Ok, I admit it was super dorky but it totally gets my point across. When sending out marketing messages (or asking your spouse to do something), people don’t necessarily listen the first time.

That’s why a commercial doesn’t just come on the television or radio once. By running the same commercial a few times you’re more likely to notice it. Same goes with those commercials that are just a little bit different from each other – many times there is a long version and a short version.

Or even when you’re listening to the radio and you think that they might have made a mistake because they played two McDonald’s commercial’s back-to-back. It wasn’t a mistake; they just tricked you into paying attention!

Repetition can be a savvy marketer’s best friend – whether it be by similarly worded tweets for an upcoming event or similarly designed postcards with an overreaching theme.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been doing some freelance work for one of my favorite clients. I recently designed a four-part postcard series for them advertising an upcoming workshop. The last workshop they held got such rave reviews, that we decided to use the testimonials from the survey forms as the basis for the campaign.

However, we also used the magic of repetition by having a look that was similar for each card, but a little bit different.

Here are the fronts of the four postcards we sent out (the inside of the postcard has the logos of the presenting companies and specific sign up information):

When each postcard is received in the mail (or the image is emailed, as was done with an accompanying email campaign) the recipient can tell that it comes from the same company and is talking about the same workshop. However, each quote highlights something different (yet awesome) about the workshop.

See, repetition IS a good thing!