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Lesson #5: Innovation is Your Invitation to Success

Article Overview: Hall succeeded not only by taking action when others refused, but by taking action in ways that nobody had yet imagined. His meteoric rise to the top is characterized by a willingness to dream and to dare.

Lesson #5: Innovation is Your Invitation to Success

Hall succeeded not only by taking action when others refused, but by taking action in ways that nobody had yet imagined. His meteoric rise to the top is characterized by a willingness to dream and to dare.

One innovation that hit Hall early on was in the range of products he was offering. Initially, he followed the rest of the crowd in offering greeting cards only for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and of course, birthdays. But Hall felt limited by those options. What about when he wanted to wish someone with an illness a speedy recovery? What about when he wanted to wish a couple a happy anniversary? Or what about when he simply wanted to say hi to a friend?

Not one to be held down, Hall set out on a quest to manufacture cards that could express sentiments for virtually any occasion. To that end, he started to hire the likes of such writers as Ogden Nash and Norman Vincent Peale to help him accurately capture a wide range of greetings. He wanted to offer his consumers more choice than they could imagine.

On top of that, Hall quickly discovered that the vast majority of his consumers preferred cards that contained verse as opposed to prose, and so he immediately switched to using quotations and poetry from such authors as William Shakespeare and Ogden Nash. It was a first for the time, but it proved to be an instant hit. The practice has since become commonplace throughout the industry.

Another early realization was that customers enjoyed browsing and selecting their own cards, instead of simply being handed one for their desired occasion by the store clerk from the stack behind him (which was standard practice for the time). To that end, Hall hired a designer to build walnut cases that could hold staggered rows of cards and install them in all the retail stores across the country where his cards were displayed. This would allow customers to browse hundreds of cards and select according to their own personal preferences.

But Hall’s innovation went above and beyond the simple logistics of operations. He actively sought to build a brand for products that had up until then been regarded as generic. He began stamping the back of each card with the engraving, “Hallmark Card.” In 1928, he produced the industry’s first ever national advertisement, a small notice in the Ladies Home Journal. He then expanded into radio advertising, personally reading a verse from one of his cards at the end of a radio show. It proved to be a popular technique.

Beyond that, Hall worked hard to build an enjoyable workplace for his employees, another innovation for his time. He made sure employees received regular paychecks, and developed the “Joyce Hall Prosperity Plan” as a response to the Great Depression. The controversial plan encouraged customers and suppliers to buy materials in advance in order to provide working capital for companies. In the end, however, Hall never worried about recession because, “In bad times people send greeting cards instead of presents.”

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Article Tags: birthdays, christmas valentines, greeting cards, happy anniversary, meteoric rise, norman vincent peale, ogden nash, personal preferences, preferred cards, prose, quotations, realization, retail stores, sentiments, speedy recovery, staggered rows, valentines day, walnut cases, william shakespeare, willingness



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