It is generally NOT a good idea to use a holiday theme for your pitch, whether to mass media or bloggers, UNLESS your product is truly holiday-oriented or you are submitting it for holiday gift guides. Pumpkin carving kits, Christmas trees, Menorah and matzoh vendors, you get a pass, more or less. But… you have to target your pitch extremely well.
The rest of you? The holiday pitch is generally a bad idea. Engrave it on your eyeballs. Whatever it takes for you to remember that:
- Everyone does not live in the USA;
- Not all bloggers celebrate Christian holidays.
In an earlier post, I mentioned the complete cluelessness of wishing Canadian bloggers “Happy Thanksgiving” in late November given that Canada celebrates its Thanksgiving in mid-October. Our ragged band of Plimoth pilgrims and the somewhat arbitrary late November date? Not relevant.
July 4th? Canada celebrates its independence day a few days earlier, France on Bastille Day July 14th, and England? Well, England celebrates the day in November that some Guy did not blow up Parliament.
Christmas and Easter… Marketers seem to believe that everyone celebrates these Christian holy days.
Not so much.
No matter what the holiday, your holiday oriented pitch stands a pretty good chance of failing UNLESS you’ve done your research and know your target is receptive. For example, me and Christmas? You’ve got a pretty open invitation, and especially if you’ve got new Christmas music.
Most bad pitches ignore these simple rules of research and relevance. Holiday ones are simply more awful because they often try to be cute or clever, and fail. Generally massively.
As in mass email spams, ending with a cheery wish for a Merry Christmas. For example:
Just your run of the mill boring holiday pitch. Except the blogger who received it is Jewish. When she forwarded the pitch to me, she commented that she’s not opposed to writing about other holiday experiences or religions. What offends her, and rightly so, is when companies claim they read the blog, in which she often mentions her religion, and then wish her personally a Merry Christmas.
The truth is, of course, that these holiday wishes are about as personal as mail addressed to “occupant.” It’s a mass-mail merge from a database that inserts the blogger’s name and blog name in the appropriate spots.
If you must do mass mailings about the suitability of your product as a gift, and I really wish you wouldn’t, there’s a reason why the word HOLIDAY is politically correct. Remember it. Holiday gift, not Christmas gift. Happy Holidays, not Merry Christmas.
“Best wishes for a safe and happy holiday” works really well for the whole month of December and generally doesn’t offend anyone.
Read the blog. How many times have you read those words here over the past few years.
If the PR agency that sent this next pitch was actually reading the blogs it spams on a regular basis, it wouldn’t have sent the pitch to the momblogger who forwarded it to me. Or at least I hope it wouldn’t have.
Her comment to me was that the pitch wasn’t that bad, but it mentions the product is designed for African American men. Last she checked, her entire family is white.
She does post pictures of her family. Quite often. If the flack was reading the blog, even sporadically, she would have known this.
Read the blog. It’s the first step toward being relevant.
Our final bad pitch for today isn’t strictly speaking a holiday pitch, but it too uses the “cookie cutter” database approach with unintended humorous effect.
The pitch itself was long and had more than a few problems. But the best part, the very best part, was the salutation which ably illustrates the dangers of mass mail merges.
Really, what more can I say?
For gross violations of mail merge technology and for so ably illustrating the flaws in a mass market, volume approach, these three pitches are awarded the Marketing Roadmaps HOLIDAY COOKIE CUTTER AWARD.
Next up: Not all holiday pitches are bad. What makes one good?
