“You shoulda been here last week” is exactly how I felt after stumbling across an extinct marketing scheme promoting Spadada. The products still exist, but Deserving Thyme, the company that manufactures them, has ended its quirky “Poetry from a Single Word” promotion. Even worse, Deserving Thyme’s follow-up efforts to the customer names it collected are one stanza short of a sonnet.
Spadada, a line of home spa kits that incorporates the moniker of an absurdist art movement into its name, was an ideal candidate for such a campaign. Here’s how it worked: In addition to salts, moisturizers, oils and creams, customers found a piece of a jigsaw puzzle in every box. They were encouraged to write a single word on the back of the puzzle piece and return it to the company, where the word would be incorporated into a custom-written poem.
In mid 2001, Kimberley Wadsworth, a New York-based theater stage manager, submitted “palindromic,” meaning having to do with a word or series of words that read the same backward as forward. A fanciful greeting in the Garden of Eden, “Madam, I’m Adam,” is a standard example of a palindrome.
Was Spadada up to the task? Wadsworth received a package from the Canadian company containing two fliers and a postcard. On the back of the postcard was a handwritten poem by “Susan the President”:
How palindromic was she
When she named her company Harpo, you see
Sell a magazine, recommend a book
Every five years, she changes her look
She’s so fine, she blows my mind
Oh Oprah ho
As Wadsworth put it, “I was impressed that they came up with something – and that it was handwritten.” The two fliers advertising additional products were a nice touch as well.
So why kill it? “The poetry from a single word program…has been discontinued for the time being as the company is focusing on product development,” Deserving Thyme spokesperson Christy Topolewski wrote in an e-mail.
Granted, the time necessary to generate a poem probably wasn’t covered by the spa kit’s $20 price. But the biggest fly in Deserving Thyme’s doubtless perfumed ointment is that Wadsworth, after giving her name and address to the company in 2001, has not heard from the company since. The goodwill Deserving Thyme generated with that poem has floated out to sea, along with the runoff from the Epsom and sea salt soaks.
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact rlevey@primediabusiness.com
