It was during a recent lively debate in the
Toppled Bollard, where several rather passable bottles of the new Swedish horse
Wine, “Rampant Elk à la Gothenburg”, had been consumed with glee, that I was
challenged on my notion that the best thing any of us at the Bollard had done
was to develop the only workable theory of direct mail in existence.
“Theories,” I was told, “are dull, boring,
tedious, and dull. Rather like Ingmar Bergman movies.” You can tell
“The advantage of the theory,” I riposted,
“is that at long last we have stopped wandering from one piece of direct mail to
the next saying ‘this one worked, that one didn’t’. The theory now allows us to
predict exactly what will work – and where we get a prediction wrong we can
amend the theory so that next time it predicts with more accuracy.”
“And what is at the base of your theory,
pray?” said John “The Professor” McVillain. (He is called the professor because
he was once found reading a book while travelling on the number 42 bus, and has
been ever since deferred to as the ultimate arbiter on all matters
intellectual.)
“It is simple,” I replied. “Early on the
idea came up that the biggest problem with direct mail was that a huge
percentage of people only glanced at it for a few seconds before throwing it
away. So we theorised we needed to keep people’s attention. Then the question
was – how should we do that?
“There were three answers. One said, since
they are only going to look for a second tell them the company name and what
the company does, so at least they remember that. Another was, give them a
picture, because a picture is worth 10,000 words (to quote the 1923 saying).
And the third said that the psychology of perception has repeatedly shown that
the brain can receive one hundred times more information from words than it can
from a picture in the same amount of time.
“Now I know this is all getting a bit
complex,” I said, noting just how much Rampant Elk had been consumed, “but it
allows us to predict that if the first thing the recipient sees is an
attractive headline we will do better than if the first thing seen is a
picture.
“The theory is full of stuff like that –
which is why I suggested we make 2006 the year of doubling response rates.
There is enough in the theory of direct mail to allow us to do that.”
The professor closed his copy of Zygmunt
Bauman’s “Liquid Life” and marked the page with his bus ticket.
Tony Attwood
PS: If you’d like to have a chat about what the Theory of Direct Mail has to say about your current promotion, just send me a copy (Tony@hamilton-house.com) and I will call you back with my comments. Or call me on 01536 399 000.