This year, Mother’s Day is receiving a little more attention from candy-by-mail marketer Hershey’s Gifts. While the company has long capitalized on traditional chocolate-giving holidays like Valentines Day, Easter and Christmas,Hershey’s has typically not given Mother’s Day the full front-page treatment. This year, a 2-pound chocolate Happy Mother’s Day greeting card takes up the entire front cover.
In addition to holidays, Hershey’s Gifts makes edible greeting cards for birthdays, graduations, and other occasions that deserve congratulations or thanks. Customers request their own short message on the famous bars, which are poured into large slabs and embossed with special motifs like tulips for spring or stars for a job well done.
This includes corporate gifts, which the company encourages with volume discounts for orders totaling in the thousands of dollars. For the smaller customer, Hershey’s has traditionally encouraged higher average orders with premiums such as a Hershey’s Bean Bunny, five gold almond bars or a giant Kiss, usually awarded with minimum orders of around $50 or $60.
Surprisingly, this new Mother’s Day catalog is the first in a long while to offer no purchase incentives. Always an equal-opportunity marketer, Hershey’s also uses the Mother’s Day catalog to prepare for Father’s Day by devoting a quarter-page of the inside back cover to Dad’s day in June.
Paul Freibott is associate research director at Paradysz Matera in New York, which tracks and analyzes direct mail pieces.
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