This week I celebrated my 26th birthday. As a kid, birthdays were relatively simple. You would wake up in the morning and rush to your parents bedrom to be given a card and a present. Then, you would be given the card that your grandparents, uncles, aunties and Commonwealth Bank Dollarmites had sent you. This would inevitably be followed by the barrage of cards that you get at the birthday party. Essentially, the cards weren’t that insightful but, along with the telephone, were the only mediums used to say ‘Happy Birthday’.

Now the game has changed. Look to the right at the proportion of ways that I got wished a ‘Happy Birthday’ this year (truly enforces that I am the nerd of the highest order when I graph my birthday messages).

10 years ago this would have been purely cards and telephone. But now there are easier ways to get in touch through email, SMS, Facebook and now Twitter. Facebook is a particularly popular medium due to the birthday reminders and quick postings. If you were Hallmark, would you be shitting yourself?

You shouldn’t be. You should be searching for new opportunity. Yes, the amount of cards given has decreased but the number of people getting in touch on birthdays has increased due to the ease of Facebook (up to four fold I would estimate). And given that Hallmark’s value proposition of delivering occasion based sentiment is still relevant, the opportunity remains huge.

People still want help in delivering the right message. They want their message to stand out. They want to make it look like they’ve gone to a lot of time and effort (when they haven’t). They want something that represents themselves and the receiver. They want to say the right thing. This is where Hallmark can help regardless of platform.

At the moment they offer personalisation, free ecards, have a Facebook application and have registered but inactive Twitter username. But they can go deeper than this and they will have to go deeper to remain relevant. Their site is currently transactional, not informative. They have to offer services which deliver relevant and indepth knowledge based on the occasion based sentiment that Hallmark has always been known for.

For example, if a friend of mine has a baby I have no idea what the process is (of the message part, I have a rough idea of the birds and the bees). They can be my guide on what kind of presents  I should give, when it’s usually OK to visit, email templates, suggested phrasing for written messages etc etc. Open it up to the community, they’ll write your content for you! It may seem like a dummies guide but that’s your area of expertise, so own it.  Make money off the website, affiliate partnerships, personalised offerings and traditional product. The best example of this is Gary Vee’s Wine Library TV. He focused on his niche, owned it and it established him as a leader (a very profitable one) in the wine industry.

Hallmark aren’t alone here. There are thousands of companies in hundreds of industries having to innovate and reshape to stay relevant as communications change. Stay true to your value proposition, deliver according to your consumers behaviour trends and squeeze the life out of it!

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