Case Study ... "Something Bigger"

Having done a fair amount of work over the years for South Valley Christian Church I was approached for ideas on how to market to an upscale neighborhood the creation of a new church in their close vicinity. I had an idea to do some progressive postcards, mailed out at 1 week intervals prior to the first service on Sept 19th.

Each card would progressively reveal more information on the back, but the fronts of the cards had to be something that would catch your eye. When I arrived at the Executive Pastor's office all I had with me was a hand sketch of a Godzilla foot and the words "Something Big" in large block letters above the foot. Below was the text, "is coming." I can still remember him, pausing, sitting back in his chair and looking at me ... there was dead silence. After what seemed like an eternity, he said, "so you think a Godzilla Theme will bring the people in huh?" I explained that due to the demographic of the target audience I believed that it was exactly this type of promotion that would in fact "bring them in." After all, the Godzilla movie had only been out of the theatres for a short time and was fresh in everyone's mind. After a couple rounds of discussions and agreeing to decrease the length of the claws, we decided to move ahead. The Foot would be first, followed by the Godzilla character looking upward in fear because he "sees what's coming." Finally the last card would show the "Church" dropping on the Godzilla character and crushing him...thus, something much bigger than even Godzilla had arrived. The project was printed by United Printing in San Jose and they were awesome. We used a four color CMYK process and added fluorescent magenta on a 5th pass on the press. The cards are as rich and vibrant in real life as you see here, in large part because of the fluorescent ink. The promotion was a success. The mother church was hoping for 40-50 people to show up. I think it inadvisable for me to take credit for a "God thing," but I do think it is noteworthy that over 150 people showed up on that first Saturday night.