Quark postcard campaign attacking Adobe backfires, offends and alienates customers.

On Wednesday QuarkVSInDesign.com, a news site dedicated to the desktop publishing industry and the legendary rivalry between Denver-based Quark, Inc., maker of QuarkXPress, and Adobe Systems, Inc., which makes InDesign and other high-end creative products, spilled the beans about a unique and apparently very quiet marketing campaign from Quark. Sets of six postcard-sized promotional cards were sent by Quark throughout early March to QuarkXPress users who had not upgraded to the latest version, 6.5. According to sources, the cards are still arriving.

The cellophane-wrapped six-pack of cards opens with the one pictured here, which reads: "The news QuarkXPress 6.5 features were designed to blow your doors off. Making Adobe cry like a baby was just an added bonus." Several other cards in the series continue the Adobe bashing.

It's "childish and immature. Like kids who stick their tongues out at others while hiding behind their mother, knowing that they'd lose in an actual face to face battle," says Katharine Shade, a desktop publisher quoted in the article, titled "Quark's Postcards from the Edge."

The article goes on to call out Quark on several ambiguous or downright misleading statements made on the cards. On one is touted XPress 6.5’s 30 levels of undo, which allow users to “correct up to 30 brain farts with ease,” in the words of the card. At the same time a testimonial quote beneath the marketing copy implies that InDesign does not have the same functionality, which is misleading. InDesign, whose version 4 is expected to be announced Monday, has had multiple undo capability since version 1.0. Moreover, as the QuarkVSInDesign.com article points out, XPress’s ability to undo is compromised when performing common tasks such as adding, removing, or re-ordering pages, or even saving. InDesign has no such limitation, and can undo long past such operations.

Until Wednesday’s publication of all six Quark postcards, their existence was largely unknown. Media pundits, from neutral media like QuarkVSInDesign.com to even those that publicly support Quark, were omitted from the mailing list. Nor does Quark.com, the company’s website, contain any reference to the postcard campaign. Not only is QuarkVSInDesign.com the first to expose the smear campaign, it is apparently the only industry news source to have obtained copies of the cards, which it makes available for public viewing in the article.

The complete media blackout about this marketing campaign has many talking that it was intended to be stealthy. With such inflammatory messages, that isn’t a difficult concept to swallow.

Obviously designed to connect with hip creative professionals through edgy, tongue-in-cheek humor, the cards have backfired. Instead of making Quark more likeable, the cards have further alienated a customer base long estranged because of the company’s history of, at best, lackadaisical customer response, and, at worst, abuse of, and hostility toward customers. Despite the open call in the QuarkVSInDesign.com article, not a single recipient of the cards-or those who have seen them within the article-could provide a wholly positive response to them. Several agreed that the cards were well-designed and humorous, but all expressed distaste over the copy.

When queried for a remark, Quark refused comment on either the article or the cards themselves. However QuarkVSInDesign.com’s server logs confirm that the article has circulated throughout both Quark and Adobe offices around the world, and confidential sources have it that it has been seen by the top personnel at both companies. If that is the case, it echoes the event that began the feud between Quark and Adobe, a 1998 buyout offer from then Quark CEO F. Fred Ebrahimi to then Adobe CEO John Warnock. In a statement to the press shortly after the offer memo, which was faxed to the Adobe offices (allegedly by Ebrahimi himself), Ebrahimi noted the low price of Adobe stock and challenged the continued commercial viability of the San Jose PostScript and PDF inventor. The action, and Quark’s comments, so enraged Adobe executives that a few weeks later at Seybold Boston on 2 March, they publicly debuted ahead of schedule what the media would dub the “Quark Killer”: InDesign.

Not until this past year, with Quark under new leadership from CTO turned CEO Kamar Aulahk, did Quark even react to InDesign, which has been steadily eroding Quark’s hold on the desktop publishing industry for the last three years. Seven years later to the day (designers began receiving the Quark postcards the first few days of March), when Adobe, now under new leadership as well, may have cooled in its animosity toward Quark, Quark has reignited the fires beneath the InDesign maker. As if it needed it with the runaway success of InDesign, Adobe has a whole new reason to keep improving and marketing its Quark killer.

Quark designed the postcards to build support for their latest version of XPress 6.5, but that has backfired. Not only have they now slapped both cheeks belonging to the one company capable of running them out of business, but they’ve also alienated more users, leaving fewer customers and supporters to care whether Adobe grinds them into dust.