Solar Eclipse Marketing: How Retailers Can Use Special Events To Grow Business

In the late 80s when I worked for direct marketer The Franklin Mint, under then-owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick, my department was responsible for compiling the “Anniversary List,” a list of upcoming anniversaries and commemorative events to use as inspiration for new product development. In the days before the internet and Google, this was a manual research effort that took a team of researchers weeks to scour reference books and cross reference citations. We’d work several years out, so that the company had time to design and develop new product concepts to commemorate particular events during the anniversary year. The company’s most famous anniversary-themed offering was the Civil War Chess Set. With our “Anniversary List,” Monday’s Solar Eclipse would have been on our radar years before, so that offers for the Solar Eclipse 2017 commemorative coin, collection of Celestial Goddess figurines and Solar Eclipse jewelry collection would be ready to roll out to our collectors. Kitschy? Surely, but it gave TFM a hook to connect with customers who wanted to collect mementoes to honor a special event or meaningful memory. The product was the thing we sold, but making a memory tangible and real was the experience we delivered to our collectors. Collectibles aren’t hot any longer, but the human need to collect mementoes as memories is still relevant. That’s what selfies are all about. Read more at Forbes.