In the blue chips - Blue Chip Marketing Group

Nation's Business, Feb, 1989 by Michael Barrier

In The Blue Chips A couple of years ago, several hundred newspaper executives received by mail a quaint little hand-carved wooden locomotive in a cardboard box bearing the message "All Aboard!" Inside was a message from Champion International Corp., a newsprint manufacturer, touting Champion's reliability as a supplier and concluding with the line, "We're in it for the long haul." Over the next six weeks, three more boxes arrived at each executive's office. In them were a hand-carved tender, a log freighter, and a caboose--and a variation on the "long-haul" message.

By the time the fourth package arrived, many of the newspaper executives were looking forward to completing their sets--and they had picked up Champion's message. "You have made your point that Champion stays on the right track by furnishing our plant with ... high-quality paper," one publisher wrote to Champion.

James J. Hoverman smiles when he recalls such letters. He is president of Blue Chip Marketing Group, a Stamford, Conn., company that conceived and assembled Champion's packages. "It's almost like a test," he says. "We're going to send you four messages, and then you synopsize for us what they said."

Blue Chip which Hoverman and Nancy Lee Gallagher, both 47, started in 1982, specializes in what it calls "dimensional marketing" (its trademarked term). This specialized form of marketing typically involves spending $100,000 to $150,000 to send several mailings to a select audience of perhaps 300 or 400 people. Blue Chip, on behalf of its clients, sends those people what can be described as 3-D advertisements.

The dimensional pieces have the elements of traditional ads: headline, illustration, copy, and a sign-off with the company's name. But the illustration is, like the train that Champion sent, a solid object. Sometimes it can, like the train, double as a gift, but that is incidental; more often, it is simply an intriguing metaphor--like the fuzzy little football that NBC Television sent to potential advertisers on its broadcasts of New Year's Day bowl games.

That football's fuzzy surface all but asked to be touchec--and Blue Chip expects all of its objects to be handled by their recipients. "People tend to remember a little bit of what they hear, a little more of what they see, but a lot of what they touch and feel," Hoverman says.

The few hundred people who receive each object make up a "blue-chip" list; they control the expenditure of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars by their corporations. So, spending hundreds of dollars to reach each "blue-chips" prospect can make sense--if a precisely tailored message does in fact get through and pave the way for an inperson sales call.

Says Gallagher, who is Blue Chip's executive vice president: "I don't care who you are, you generally will not throw an unopened box away. And once you've opened it, if it's as intriguing as the stuff we develop, you're going to read the message, and see the illustration, and go on to read the copy."

Before starting Blue Chip, Hoverman and Gallagher worked together for about a dozen years at Progressive Architecture magazine is Stamford; Hoverman was publisher, Gallagher was director of promotion and marketing, and, Hoverman says, "we were looking for a way to communicate with our advertising audience.

"We did a survey across the East Coast," he continues, "and basically we found there wasn't a company or a medium available for a company like ours that wanted to talk to a relatively small but very important group of people. So we invented the medium of dimensional marketing."

Once Progressive Architecture started sending dimensional pieces, Gallagher says, "it wasn't long before we were getting calls from major New York advertising agencies," wanting to know which firm was producing the pieces for the magazine.

Hoverman and Gallagher soon concluded that, as Hoverman says, "we had a real niche." They opened their business in two rooms in a frame building in downtown Stamford. Now Blue Chip occupies two of the building's three floors. Sales last year were about $4.5 million, and Blue Chip's payroll has grown to about two dozen employees.

Twenty or more projects may be under way at any given time, and Hoverman and Gallagher acknowledge that preserving the handmade quality of what Blue Chip produces could become more difficult. "We're not going to have dramatic growth," Hoverman says, "because we simply couldn't have dramatic growth and pay the same kind of attention and give the same kind of blue-chip service that we do."