Keepable trade card

The pattern

This still is filed under Keepable trade card.

Define

A small card people keep (pretty, useful, or collectible) that carries the brand after the encounter.

Mechanism

Retention object. The gift is the media. Recall is paid for by usefulness or delight, not by repetition.

Verdict

We can put a physical or digital keepable in someone's pocket and they will not throw it away.

Why it works

Nothing on the face says what the soap does, and that is the design decision. The job of an 1880s trade card was to be kept, so the card buys attention with a pleasant colour portrait and spends all of it on making the name memorable. The name gets full ornamental treatment top and bottom while the picture is left unframed and unlettered, so the eye lands on the face and then has nowhere to go but the two lines of display type. Sandwiching the image between matching bands makes the card read as one designed object rather than a picture with captions under it.

The big idea

A keepable colour portrait of a child in a straw hat, framed by the brand name above and the maker below, so shoppers remember which soap to ask for.

The offer

American Extra Soap, made by Fisk Manufacturing Co. of Springfield, Mass. No price, claim or terms appear on this face.

Lines from the ad

AMERICAN EXTRA SOAP

FISK MANUF'G CO.

SPRINGFIELD, MASS.

Steal this when

Use this when the product is undifferentiated and what you actually need is name recall at the moment of purchase. Give the middle to something worth keeping and put the name, not the claim, in the display type.