This article first appeared in the November 2022 issue of Australian Printer authored by Posterboy Printing’s Daniel Edwards

Not long ago, I moved to a new house with an old garden shed slumped in the back corner of the yard. Spreading from a corner of the shed was a messy pile of surplus fence palings flat on the ground, taking up space I wanted for my lawn mower.

I set about picking them up and piling them outside. Right at the bottom of the pile, I came across what looked like a long grey stocking lumpy with snail shells. I thought it odd but not significant.

As I lifted the next and last paling, something gleaming black about the size of a cricket ball scuttle across the floor.

I was looking at a wild Funnel Web spider for the first time in my life. The ‘stocking’ I had found earlier was its nest.

Highly venomous spiders are a reality in Australia. My mother equipped my childhood home with a fridge magnet from a local pest control company. The artwork included photos of and information about all the dangerous spiders common in our area, featured prominently was the deadly Funnel Web.

That magnet sat on our fridge for easily a decade. I must have looked at the photo of the Funnel Web a thousand times. When I saw that spider, inches from my feet in the dim light, I knew what it was, thanks in part to that magnet.

A flyer lasting years on a fridge is not a rare story for a printer. Print marketing has an exceptionally long tail, and it is not uncommon for flyers to bring home customers years after their distribution. Print can exist for years within a home or office.

Emotional content may sound difficult

The idea of creating a design that produces emotions sounds difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of emotions on offer, and some are relatively easy to trigger. Humour, surprise, knowledge, arousal, fear can all be triggered by an image, a punchline, or valuable information.

Knowledge is a very practical emotion to aim for. Every business is asked the same handful of questions every day. These FAQs are low-hanging fruit for creating content that is valuable to the end user and creates emotion.

To return to my pest control fridge magnet example, questions about dangerous spiders are undoubtedly an FAQ for those in the pest control industry. The images on that fridge magnet I grew up with were valuable to my mother and ultimately to me years later.

I used this approach on a job recently for a martial arts academy. The academy wanted a flyer promoting an upcoming open day for prospective students. We used one side of the flyer to promote the open day; on the reverse side, we put a class timetable and tips for first-time visitors.

The thinking is that people would use the flyer for the open day and keep it on the fridge to get them to their first class. All the while it is on the fridge, it is being helpful, creating the emotion of knowledge, and quietly building emotional capital and perceived value of the brand every time they look at it. It keeps the academy in the conversation and may bring in new students or help reactivate past students.

Paper and print have been a part of our culture for hundreds of years, and it has become deeply embedded. Every household has a place designated for the storage of printed paper and others for the display of it.

Familiar places are in the hallway near the front door, on the kitchen bench, on a set of shelves next to a desk or on the side of the fridge. When print enters a space, it has a place to go and can spend a long time in a person’s possession. The length of the stay allows for multiple impressions on a person, satisfying the requirements for brand building.

Print also has two sides, allowing for two different messages to be sent on the same piece of paper. One side can be devoted to emotional priming, while the other is devoted to short-term activation. Satisfying the marketing best practice of supporting long-term campaigns with short-term campaigns.

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