Comic Strip on Yahoo! Leads to Research on Greeting Card Purchases
Dave Aiello wrote, "Last week, I added a couple of comip strips to my MyYahoo! page. One of the strips I added was NonSequitur. The strip published for today featured a card store manager who said to a customer, 'They used to be called sympathy cards, but since women buy 90% of all greeting cards, we decided to be more market specific....'"
"This made me wonder if the statistic that was the basis for this comic strip was, in fact, true. Since I am convinced that I can find much of the information that I seek on a daily basis for little or no cost on the Internet, I decided to use this situation as a test. Read on for more details...."
Dave Aiello continued:
Here is how I performed my test:
- Using Google, I searched for the phrase greeting card demographics.
- Looking through the results, I found the following useful tidbits:
- Greeting Cards 101, a "how to" that tries to give tips on constructing a greeting card site, a la Blue Mountain Greetings.
The most important piece of information on this page was the link to MyPostcards Christmas card survey, a link in found Commandment Number 2. Following that link to the page it points to, then backing out to the parent level URL, http://mypostcards.com/media/, I was able to find a page that discusses the general demographics of the MyPostcard Network. The result? Consistantly, 25% men, 75% women.
- Returning to the original Google search, on the second page of results, I found this link to a 1997 survey by Shannon Dortch in American Demographics called "Greetings, America". This discusses retail purchases of paper greeting cards. Dennis Chupa of the Greeting Card Association is interviewed. Among the findings:
One of the industry's biggest obstacles is its relatively small core-customer base. For
American Greetings, it's women aged 48 to 52. "They purchase 85 percent to 90 percent of all greeting cards across all channels of
distribution," Chupa says.
When I hear a statistic as definitive as the one in the comic strip, I often wonder if there is any possibility that it is true. (In this case, one could argue that it is.) This also illustrates the incredible amount of useful knowledge distilled in the Internet. The key to unlocking it is, can you find it when you need it?
I hope to use this article as a teaching aid with CTDATA's clients, because it demonstrates an effective Web search technique for finding answers to every day questions.