What sensible media plan includes doorhangers? What is the goal of a doorhanger campaign? Awareness through irritation?

I live in the suburbs, so my perception may be coloured. We seem to get a lot of doorhangers – from the standard coupon for local restaurants to the oblong, the irregular and the just plain inconvenient.

Sure, a market still exists for doorhangers. Hotel guests need a convenient way to order breakfast, ask for a room refresh, or warn the hotel staff that “if this dooknob’s a rockin”, don’t come a knockin’.”

There a distinction in this case, though: the client is the one choosing to use a doorhanger.

In fact, there’s only one application for a door hanger campaign that appears effective: when the recipient has been pre-qualified.

Social marketing campaigns appear to rely on door hangers as one component of an integrated marketing campaign to push behaviour change by residents – whether to encourage composting, change recycling habits, or avoid groundwater pollution.

Similarly, political campaigns leave doorhangers behind as a polite reminder: “Hey! we were here to drag grandma and grandpa down to the polling station, but you didn’t answer the door.”

Which still leaves me with the three 8×6 fish-shaped door hangers I received over the weekend. The work of a lazy media planner who just bought novelty hangers by the tens of thousands and had them distributed by the Citizen.

How did I get three? One in the giant flyer package that gets jammed into my mailbox every Thursday (delivered by a subcontractor working for a Citizen subsidiary), one with my Citizen, and one blown down the road from a neighbour’s door knob.

And not a one of them pushed me any nearer to taking my banking to the President’s Choice accounts available at Loblaws.

[tags] doorhanger, door hanger, direct marketing [/tags]