Prepaid Phone Card Design

Yesterday’s Consumed, a weekly trends and marketing colum in the NYT Magazine had and interesting article about the aggressive designs international calling cards display to win over their thrifty consumers.  Our friend Wendy Dembo, a speaker at the PSFK Conference in  New York was featured in the article.

Walker writes:

Prepaid phone cards — which sell long-distance minutes in advance for
use on any phone — fall into one of those consumer categories in which
the tastefulness of a design isn’t much of an issue. To shop for one
entails confronting a barrage of blunt, screaming graphic treatments,
each jostling for the viewer’s eye at the newsstand or convenience
store. This echoes the unwieldy nature of the phone-card business: card
selections vary significantly not just by region but also by
neighborhood, and new cards are released practically every day. It’s a
“highly, highly competitive market,” says Jeffrey Kapner, vice
president for marketing for the long-distance carrier Total Call
International.

Five years ago, flags were a dominant form of card-design signaling,
says Harvey Caron of Pentagon Graphics, a major printer of prepaid
cards. But since then, there has been a move toward cultural images:
Jamaica cards might have images of cricket or soccer, a card for
calling Israel might show the Wailing Wall and so on. “Everyone is
trying to make their card stand out,” Caron says — and if that involves
a design that some might consider rather didactic, or even ugly, well,
so be it.

Years ago, when prepaid cards were relatively rare, some featured
“beautiful artwork,” Veres says, but aggressive designs have long since
taken over. Still, at least some card makers have experimented with
looks that, if not exactly beautiful, are pretty creative. When Wendy
Dembo, a strategic-marketing and trend consultant based in New York,
started buying prepaid cards to call a client in Brazil, she was
baffled by the “chaos” of choices blending in at the newsstand with
magazines, lotto tickets, candy and tiny-type charts showing country
rates. But since finding one that she likes, she has lately noticed
cards with elaborate die-cut shapes: a pair of boxing shorts, an
avocado, a woman’s backside in short shorts and so on. She was tempted
to tell design-savvy friends — although it turned out that few of them
had been paying enough attention to prepaid cards to appreciate the
development — but not to stop using the card she knows works best for
her. “The design is just hideous,” she says, “like somebody has gone
crazy with Photoshop.” Even so, she knows it when she sees it.

Consumed: Dial Tone