Carol Wright Trims Co-op Circulation

COX DIRECT, Largo, FL, has cut the annual circulation of its Carol Wright cooperative direct mail program from 250 million to 200 million pieces to better focus on its core market-families with children.

This decision follows a similar reduction in 1998, when the yearly circulation was trimmed from 300 million to 250 million, according to Hollis Perrin, marketing manager at Carol Wright. The firm now does 10 mailings a year, each to the in-house database.

“We want to focus more on families with children [from newborns to age 17] because they spend more on each member of the household,” says Perrin.

Carol Wright had already overhauled its database with frequent buyer and purchase history data gathered from strategic alliances with children’s retailers, packaged goods manufacturers and database firms. The 200 million names represent “more of a responsive database,” Perrin says. “We know these people have responded to this type of offer.”

“They are the households that spend the most on consumables,” adds Karen Conroy, director of marketing for Carol Wright.

The rollout of a new co-op program through a partnership with Lamaze, which was announced this spring, is another aspect of Carol Wright’s family focus.

A separate program, Enjoying Life, which had been geared to consumers 50 years of age and older, has been scrapped.

The cutbacks reflect the higher costs associated with a trend occurring generally in co-op programs: targeting mailings more and more precisely.

“We can target down to the household level,” Perrin says. “You can get one mailing while your neighbor gets another.”

“The issue is that the co-op was serving two masters,” says Bob Sher, of R.K. Sher & Associates in Highland Park, IL, who was president of Donnelley Marketing, Carol Wright’s previous owner.

Sending co-ops to both family and over-50 markets is expensive because “they are not mutually compatible,” he says. “There’s no overlap.”