French Connection harness the power of the print

French Connection Winter 2014 catalogue

There is something special about receiving a printed catalogue if it's well executed and makes an emotional connection with the customer.

UK fashion retailer French Connection have got things just right. Their latest French Connection printed catalogue is a thing of beauty. It's not ostentatious but its unstated design, clever, striking creative and use of matt papers generates a strong desire to see more.

In their Manchester store, the creative is skilfully carried through into the merchandising so you feel you already know a good deal about the season's collection. It works well on the company's website too.

This shows that their is a strong place for print and direct mail in any company's marketing communications plans so long as it meets the needs of customers and dovetails with other activity.

Facebook competitions - now even easier to run

With Facebook relaxing their competition Terms & Conditions, it's never been easier to run a competition on Facebook. Here's why you might want to do this:

• start a conversation
• create a buzz
• capture customer data
• increase your Likes
• promote a new product or service
• build reputation
• seek customer input into product development

The list is almost endless.

The most popular type of competition asks entrants to Like as the way to enter. Facebook T&Cs allow you to do this. The T&Cs are not onerous but avoid using a share this link on a timeline method of entry - it's one of the few prohibitions in the T&Cs. It means that you don't need to use a third part application such as Offerpop or custom design to produce your application any more. Having said that, the latter does produce some amazingly good competitions.  Here are some good recent examples with creativity at the fore.

Red Spotted Hanky Facebook travel voucher promotion

Berghaus Facebook photo competition

Innocent Smoothie Facebook knitting promotion

Dorset Cereals Facebook spot the difference promotion


Here are the latest FacebookT&Cs in full