Attractive marketing? The ubiquitous refrigerator magnet

What’s the attraction of  refrigerator magnets? They clutter. They allow you to attach more clutter. They fall off and break, which makes your clutter just that much more junky looking. Yet, we have quite a few at my house, mostly souvenirs from family trips, including a beheaded soldier from Williamsburg.  We never keep the ones from the pest control people, real estate agents, or other commercial enterprises. Usually they are ugly, what with their phone numbers and lousy slogans and faces, and who needs ugly clutter?

Other people I know have the whole alphabet, plastic letters that let you spell words, even bad ones–which is a fun thing to do when you are at their house and you’ve gone into the kitchen for that third glass of Chardonnay. Still other people have magnetic poetry, words you can arrange and rearrange to create all kinds of poems, especially bad ones. And then there are the magnets that act like frames for photos or kiddy art.  We had one that said “My Kid Did This.” That, of course, invites a parent to post a cute art project or good report card.  Or, it can become a kind of Frame of Shame.  A bad report card. A photo of a messy room. A suspension notice from school.  It depends, I suppose, on what kind of parent you are.  And what kind of kid you’ve got. I think we just took down that magnet altogether.

I have the chance to write everything from annual reports to internet ads.  Recently, believe it or not, I wrote a refrigerator magnet. Which got me to thinking about the whole genre. I found out that the average number of views a single household refrigerator magnet garners in a year is around 14,600.  That’s pretty good. Create an especially nice one and there are plenty of people who will add it to their collections.  People like Louise J. Greenfarb (doesn’t that just sound like the name of a magnet collector?). She has more than 40,000, and her cars (and everything else made of metal, I’m sure) are covered up with them. You can read about her collection here.

Interestingly (or not) there’s no official name for a magnet collector in the way there is for a coin collector (numismatist) or a stamp collector (philatelist)  or even a collector of teddy bears (arctophillist).  Magnut, maybe.

Although I may sometimes question the wisdom of commercial magnets, the one I worked on is an exception. It was commissioned by Homewood Suites to promote their partnership with the Books for Kids Foundation. Unlike other companies that might turn to the refrigerator magnet for marketing or public relations, Homewood actually has the refrigerators to put them on, which makes the whole strategy a stroke of genius. Think about it.  Every suite has a fridge, the perfect place to exhibit a magnetic message and reach a captive audience.  At the same time magnets just make the kitchen that much more like home, which is the whole idea behind Homewood Suites, anyway.