Everyone's talking green, and all sorts of green initiatives are out there, but one from Honda may be the most imaginative: a direct mail piece for its line of eco-friendly lawn and garden products that turns into a plant, literally.
The piece was made from recycled paper that's also biodegradable, and it came with wild flower seeds.
It was sent out in December to potential UK customers. It instructed recipients: "Plant this letter."
The idea came from Inferno, Honda's London agency, and it arose from discussions of how the agency might come up with a campaign that was even better than carbon neutral.
“Most people throw direct mail in the bin, so we thought it might be a good idea to get them to throw it into their gardens to grow some plants,” says Jaime Diskin, a copywriter at Inferno.
“We did some digging around and found a company that could mix seeds into the paper mix to make paper that could grow,” says Diskin.
To plant the piece, recipients simply crumpled it and buried it in soil.
The customized paper is thicker and more uneven than regular paper and conventional printers weren’t able to handle it, so the agency tracked down an old-school letterpress to imprint its message.
Inferno exhausted the paper company’s entire stock of growing paper, but it expects to have more later this month for a new round of direct mailers.
