My wife and I are just plain stupid about our dog. Perhaps its just because we have two teenagers who can no longer absorb all the love we have for them. Or perhaps it’s because our dog really is the best dog in the world. Regardless, recently my wife suggested that I have custom postage stamps made with our dog’s picture on them. So I dutifully went to
Stamps.com and ordered the customized photo stamps. It was amazingly easy, taking less than five minutes including credit card data entry and photo uploading. A week later the stamps arrived and our holiday cards will never be the same. We laughed for about five minutes and have no doubt that the best part of getting our xmas card this year will not be the cute photo of my kids, will not be my annual (and oh so clever) year-in-review letter. No, the best part of our card will be the stamp on the envelop. I suspect it will even make a few otherwise harried postal workers laugh.Personalized stamps are a novel example of marketing for good, engaging the consumer in product design, allowing the consumer to actually enhance a normally pedestrian product and even creating a little bit of entertainment, assuming the consumer chooses an interesting photo for their stamp. This idea certainly gets my stamp of approval. (NOTE: Non-profit fund raisers may also want to look into customized stamps as a fund-raising opportunity–need to think through the mechanics of such a program but feels like a novel and perhaps painless way to get consumers to make donations while buying something they recognize is indulgent.)