PA RT T W O O F T H E

COMMONSENSE MARKETING SERIES

T H E M IS S I N G
51 H E L P F U L
MA R K E T I N G I D E A S
More simple, tested, yet often neglected ideas guaranteed
to improve results

D R AY T O N B I R D

Drayton Bird kn ows

more ab out marketing
th an anyon e in th e world.
Dav id Ogilv y
Foun der, Ogilvy & Mather

Dray ton B ird is a w ise an d

wily direct marketer. People all
over the world have been lu cky
en ough to learn from him.
Sir Mar tin Sorrell, Founder, WPP
1 00% MONEY-B ACK GUARANTE E: PUT TH ESE IDE AS TO THE TEST. IF YOUR PROFITS DONT INCREASE BY 10 0
TIMES WHAT YOU PAID FOR THIS BOOK , IL L GIVE YOU YOUR MONEY B ACK - GLADLY, IF A LIT TLE PUZZLE D.

DRAYTON BIRD is an internationally-applauded author,

copywriter, teacher, lecturer and consultant.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton,
with others such as Tom Peters, Ted Levitt and Philip Kotler,
as one of the 50 individuals who have shaped modern
marketing.
His best-known books include Commonsense Direct and
Digital Marketing (currently in its 28th year and 5th edition),
Sales Letters that Sell and Marketing Insights and Outrages.
Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing was described by
David Ogilvy as Pure gold. Read it and re-read it. It contains
the knowledge of a lifetime and has sold more than
200,000 copies in 17 languages.
Drayton has written over 1,000 columns for international
magazines, spoken in 50 countries and worked with many
leading brands, among them American Express, BA, Deutsche
Post, Ford, Microsoft, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, Philips,
The Royal Mail, Unilever and Visa.
He now runs the London marketing consultancy Drayton
Bird Associates, the online Commonsense Marketing
programme (www.draytonbirdcommonsense.com) and the
European Academy of Direct & Interactive Marketing Studies.

PRAISE FOR DRAYTON BIRD

Here is a man who has lived it, studied it and done it.
When it comes to direct marketing there is no-one better
than Drayton Bird.
Director of the First US Trade Mission for Direct Marketing
People toss the phrase living legend around far
too casually. Drayton Bird really is such a person. he
knows direct marketing from the inside out,
and the crucial details necessary to turn concepts,
strategies, and words themselves into sales,
empires, and fortunes.
David Garfinkel, Publisher,World Copywriting Blog

Your books are among my most

valued possessions, and easily among the greatest ever
written on advertising, right up there with
those by Caples, Ogilvy, Schwab, Reeves and Hopkins.
Gary Bencivenga, Hall of Fame copywriter

ALSO BY DRAYTON BIRD:

Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing
Kogan Page, 2007
How to Write Sales Letters that Sell
Kogan Page, 1997
Marketing Insights and Outrages
Kogan Page, 2000
The Master Marketer: How to Combine Tried and Tested
Techniques with the Latest Ideas to Achieve Spectacular
Marketing Success (with Christopher Ryan)
Kogan Page, 1994
Open for Business! How to Write Letters that Get Results
(with Courtney Ferguson)
McGraw-Hill 2001
Some Rats Run Faster
Secker & Warburg, 1964
The Drayton Bird Commonsense Marketing Online Seminars:
www.draytonbirdcommonsense.com

 Drayton Bird 2013

The right of Drayton Bird to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism
or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988, this publication
may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the
prior permission in writing of the author, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in
accordance with the terms and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning
reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the author at the under mentioned
address:
Drayton Bird Associates
Moyle House, Fleet Hill, Finchampstead,
Wokingham, Berkshire, RG40 4LJ.
Tel: +44 (0) 845 3700 121
www.draytonbirdcommonsense.com

THE MISSI NG 51 HELPFUL

MARKETING IDEAS
More simple, tested, yet often neglected
ideas guaranteed to improve results
DRAYTON BIRD

Foreword by Brian Featherstonhaugh,

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer,
OgilvyOne Worldwide??????

D R AY TO N B I R D A S S O C I AT E S LT D
2013

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Oil discovered in hell.
HOW YOU CAN GET MOST OUT OF
THIS (AND ANY) BOOK
Please read these instructions completely before you begin.Youll save time and
learn more.
1. BATTLE TESTED RECESSION SURVIVAL STRATEGY
FOR THE REST OF US
Force your mar keting to make money by measur ing.
2. CRM CHECKLIST. OR A TEST: ARE YOU SOBER?
CRM systems can help or hur t you.
3. HOW NOT TO CHOOSE AN AGENCY
If you want to waste your money and time, have beauty parades of prospective
agencies . If you want results , do what smar t marketers do: test.
4. WHAT A DEAD DICTATOR CAN TEACH YOU
ABOUT MARKETING
Fame may help sales , but its not ever ything. You need proof.
5. IF YOU WRITE WELL AS THIS CHARMING MAN,
CALL ME, YOU ARE HIRED
Read it and weep then copy.
6. SUSHI AND THE FUTURE OF BRANDS
Building your brand is wor k. It doesnt end with a wr itten strategy, it star ts there.
7. ONE OF THESE 99 WORDS COULD SLAUGHTER
YOUR EMAILS
Know the words that could stop you from making money you deser ve.
8. HOW TO SELL TO BUSINESSES
(PLUS A TIP ON DEALING WITH GEEKS)
If you treat people as people, youll do well.

9. WHY THE PROFIT IS SELDOM IN THE FIRST SALE

To understand the life time value of your customer is magic . To ignore it is a sin.
10. NEVER FORGET WHY IT IS CALLED
DIRECT RESPONSE
Take advantage of per sonal direct media.
11. A BUSINESS LESSON FROM A FREE BIRD
Dont lock your self into long difficult contracts.
12. DO NOT LET NEW MEDIA FOOL YOU
Not ever ything that clicks is gold.
13. STATISTICS TO MAKE YOU THINK...
"If your head is in the refr igerator and your feet are in the oven, on average
your temperature is nor mal."
14. GUT CHECK
Gut instinct is an expensive commodity.
15. COULD THESE TIPS IMPROVE YOUR NEWSLETTER?
The best newsletter is personal - almost like a secret whispered only to you.
16. 26 REASONS WHY A PROMISING AD FAILED
Nothing fails like success .
17. STRATEGY VERSUS TACTICS
The best long-term profits are made up of a succession of shor t-term profits .
18. MORE ON LAYOUT MAGIC COLORS AND
PICTURES THAT LIFT RESPONSE
Design is not always common sense.
19. THE ONLY WAY TO RESOLVE EVERY
MARKETING QUESTION
If you dont ask people to reply you will never know how good the ad is . But
many people are scared of being put to the test in the only way that matter s
through measurement.

20. GETTING A JOB CALLS

FOR GOOD OLD FASHIONED MARKETING.
This is the most popular post I have ever put up. Getting a job is an old fashioned mar keting job.
21. HOW NOT TO GO BROKE
The road to failure is paved with success .
22. YOU HAVE A BRAND WHY THROW IT AWAY?
There are two things mar keters love to do: build their brands - and kill them.
23. HOW YOU MIGHT BEAT FAT BLUE CHIP FIRMS
Do not forget to tell people what you're selling, big boy.
24. MAYBE YOU SHOULD IGNORE
DIRECT MARKETING
PR could get you there faster and cheaper.
25. HOW TO CREATE A GOOD SLOGAN
A GUIDE TO MASOCHISTS
You dont always need a slogan. Many would be better off without.
26. NEVER ASSUME IN BUSINESS
Show your wor k to a stranger ; youd be surpr ised how that could improve it.
27. DONT BE VAGUE
AN USUAL ADVERTISING LESSON FROM INDIA
Precision matters more than you may think: this example brought in 7 ideal
marr iage candidates .
28. BEWARE CHEAP DEALS ON BIG NUMBERS
If you are not careful, you could lose your shirt on must-do deals .
29. DO YOU HAVE STRIPPERS BEHIND COUNTERS?
Is your business exciting, fabulous and fantastic? Really?
30. ON FASHION
Fashion is a for m of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it ever y six
months. Oscar Wilde

31. TO LIMIT YOURSELF, IS TO LIMIT YOUR PROFITS

Dont get trapped in one medium or form of mar keting.
32. TRY SOME DONKEY (OR SCHNAUZER) BUSINESS
There are no small par ts in theatre, only small actor s. The same is tr ue in adver tising.
33. EVERY TIME WE GET CREATIVE WE LOSE MONEY.
Fight to rein in your brilliant creative flair.
34. UNDERSTAND DIRECT BRAND-BUILDING
Building your brand with direct mar keting could be more powerful (and
cheaper) than conventional image adver tising.
35. HOW QUESTIONNAIRES COULD
INCREASE YOUR SALES
People love to give their opinions. You will love the profit you get from asking
them.
36. WHERE TO FIND YOUR MISSING PROFITS (AGAIN)
Regain your lost millions.
37. HOW NOT TO CHOOSE AN AGENCY
The way some people to choose ad agencies is more destructive than you may
think.
38. GO SMALL. IT COULD PAY OFF BIG
A large adver t may please your ego not your bottom line.
39. LESSONS FROM SELLING EXPENSIVE COMPLEX
PRODUCTS AND SERVICES LIKE AIR PLANES,
REAL ESTATE, SEMINARS AND LEGAL ADVICE
Dont let high pr ice dismay you. Its just salesmanship.
40. WRITING THAT WORKS
Make your wr iting not your reader s do the wor k.
41. GO FOR THE KILL! A SIMPLE BUSINESS LESSON
FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Your compelling headline is wasted if you don't go all out for a sale.

42. IS DISCOUNTING FATAL?

The mistake that almost killed some of the wor ld's biggest brands
43. UPSIDE-DOWN MARKETING
Why is upside-down mar keting so popular? And is it killing your business?
44. THE ETERNAL BATTLE BETWEEN SALES
AND MARKETING
Bad results whose fault?
45. HOW CLAIRE, JOSE AND I
NEARLY SOLD THE UNSELLABLE
Ignore the experts. It could be the most profitable move you make this year.
46. WHAT SOME FAMOUS COPYWRITERS TAUGHT ME
Str ictly for those interested in copy.
47. WHERE THE MONEY LEAKS AWAY
Beware or ganised briber y.
48. I WOULDNT DO THAT IF I WERE YOU
And 21 other common ways to sink your fir m.
49. RECIPE FOR EXPLOSIVE RESULTS?
Questions , questions, questions .
50. WHAT LITTLE I KNOW ABOUT MANAGEMENT
Avoid managing by fear.
51. ADVICE ON BRANDS
Back by popular request.
BONUS IDEA: DISCOVER THE HIDDEN MARKETING
POWER OF EASY TO MAKE VIDEOS

I N T RO D U C T I O N
Oil discovered in hell.
DO YOU LIKE TO THINK FOR YOURSELF? Or do you
prefer to follow the crowd?
Why should you want to think for yourself? Why not do
what everyone else does?
Benjamin Graham, who trained the worlds greatest investor
Warren Buffett, told a story over 40 years ago that illustrates
why its not always a good idea:
An oil prospector, moving to his heavenly reward, was met
by St. Peter with bad news.
Youre qualified for residence, said St. Peter, but, as you
can see, the compound reserved for oil men is reserved. Theres
no way to squeeze you in.
After thinking a moment, the prospector asked if he might
say just four words to the present occupants. That seemed harmless
to St. Peter, so the prospector cupped his hands and yelled: Oil
discovered in hell.
Immediately the gate to the compound opened and all the oil
men marched out to head for the nether regions.
Impressed, St. Peter invited the prospector to move in and
make himself comfortable.
The prospector paused. No, he said, I think Ill go along
with the rest of the boys. There might be some truth to that
rumour after all.
12

You see, the temptation to follow the crowd is almost overwhelming. It removes the need for hard work and study.
But only through studying what has happened in the past
can you start to think properly - for all sound decisions derive
from relevant knowledge
That is what these marketing ideas give you.
I hope you find them helpful and applicable
They are based on practice, not theory. Often in difficult
situations, in small and large markets across the world.
They have cost millions to uncover and took me five decades
to gather.
Ive often said I wished I had known about them sooner. I
mean it. I would have been spared many sleepless nights. And a
depressingly vast amount of money.
You have my unconditional money back guarantee: if you
put them in action they will work. And I hope you do, because
this book is an action book.
There are enough lemmings happily following any new fad
or trend over the nearest cliff. The current one is social media.
Why not join those who are guided by what works?

Drayton Bird
P.S. This is the second of these books. You can get the first here:
http://draytonbird.net/51ideas/

13

H O W YO U C A N G E T M O S T O U T
OF THIS (AND ANY) BOOK
Please read these instructions carefully before you begin.
Youll save time and learn more.
There are two motives for reading a book; one,
that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
- philosopher Bertrand Russell
DID YOU KNOW that according to a University of Waterloo
study you forget 80% of what you read after 24 hours?
For example if you read a 200 page book today, you can recall
only about 40 pages of it tomorrow. But it doesnt stop there. It
gets worse.
After a month you may remember only 2% - 3% of what
you have read less than 9 pages out of 200.
Imagine how much time and money you waste! But luckily
you can improve your comprehension and even save time with
few simple learning tricks.
Please read these instructions completely before you continue.
How to extract the most out of what you read in the least time:
1. Skim the book through quickly: flirt with it; see how its
written.
2. Preview every page, a second or two per page no more.
14

3. Read the book from beginning to end. Accelerate on

familiar parts. Slow down on important parts. (Dont do any
heavy note taking at this point. Thats for later.)
4. Briefly review what you read. Just as you previewed the
material earlier.
5. Now complete your notes. You cant
make intelligent notes until you have read
the book completely, because how could you
know in advance what really is going to be
important to you?

Relax! Simply follow

these study tips to get
a maximum return
on your investment in
this book.

6. Review. Youd be surprised how much

you have already forgotten. Even a 5 minute
review could be enough lift your recall back
to 70% to 80%. Reviewing is the key to a
strong memory.

If you follow these steps, you will be able to cut your reading
time and improve your comprehension and recall. Why?
Because just as in advertising, repetition pays.
Now you have hammered the information into your head
several times, so it will stay there longer. But this process doesnt
take you much longer than reading the old way. It may take
less.
Heres why.
When you do a little warm ups with the text, your brain
adjusts to what you are studying. Just as you warm up your muscles
before sports. Makes sense?
You will read faster because you are now more familiar with
the text. And by previewing, reviewing and intelligent note taking
you will remember more of what you have read.
15

Whats more you can now quickly review your notes, so your
investment keeps paying off in the future instead of vanishing
from your mind like a shadow in the night.
And if you really want to boost your learning, write answers
to these two questions before you begin:
1. Why am I reading this?
2. What do I want to get out of it?
By doing that you are giving your mind a sense of direction
and purpose
Please begin now and remember: to get the best results
studying should be fun not a chore. So I hope you find what
follows not just helpful but entertaining.

MY RATHER EXTRAVAGANT
100% MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE
Some of these ideas may seem almost laughably simple.
Some may relate to you and your plans; some may not.
You probably already know a few yet one of the
most common comments I have received about them is,
I knew that, and we should be doing it, but were not.
Its so easy to overlook even the most obvious things,
isnt it? I do all the time.
The important thing is that every one of the Helpful
Ideas in this book is based on experience, not theory.
One of the worlds most successful direct marketers
told me that not knowing about one of the ideas in the
first of these books cost him at least a million dollars.
Put them to the test for yourself.
If your profits dont increase by 100 times what you
paid for the book, Ill give you your money back gladly,
if a little puzzled.

16

HELPFUL IDEA 1:
Battle tested recession survival strategy
for the rest of us
Force your marketing to make money by measuring.
Marketing is one of the first things to feel the axe when
times get tough and no wonder if you have no idea what
it's doing for you.
DO THE FOLLOWING FIGURES interest you?
By moving nine words from the bottom to the top of a form,
a loan firm increased the number of applications by 240%
Adding two words in an email subject line doubled the
number of enquiries about a telephone service
Putting someone's face in a letter about investment increased
sales by 20%
Removing one piece from a direct mail piece for a bank
increased return on investment by 92%
If those figures don't interest you, stop reading now.
If they do, keep going.
Why managers cut marketing
When recession strikes, where do managers save money? Well,
very logically they cut out things that don't seem essential.
Often that means marketing ... a rather vague discipline which
often seems to ask you to spend a lot of money for an unquantifiable
return.
This is because very little marketing is conducted in a measurable
17

way. Yet all the really successful marketers - Procter & Gamble
for instance - measure everything. What is more on today's dominant medium, the internet, everything can be measured.
If you look at some of the world's most successful firms Amazon, eBay or American Express, for example - they rely entirely
or almost entirely on direct marketing. Moreover, all internet
marketing is direct marketing. That is, messages reach people
directly via email, or they go directly to it when they go to a
web page.
There are many other kinds of direct marketing - direct
mail, mail order advertising, SMS messages for instance. And
today the overwhelming majority of selling messages direct you
to a website, giving you the chance to build a direct relationship.
But what they all have in common is they make it easy to gauge
what you get for your money.
Until you force every single message or action to prove, as
far as possible, its value as an investment, you are conducting
what I call kindergarten marketing.
Why it makes sense
There are three reasons, all simple, why direct marketing makes
sense.
First, as I have explained, by coding all your messages you
can measure your results, and when times are tough you need
to know what results your investment is producing.
Second, it is an ideal way to target and acquire the right kind
of customers - the ones most likely to spend the most money.
And third, it is the perfect way to retain those customers for
longer - and the customer you have got is from 3 to 8 times
more profitable than an identical person who is not a customer.
In short, direct marketing, whether online or in traditional
18

media allows you to spend your money where you will get the
greatest return on investment.
But there is another reason which I first pointed out to an
audience in India in 1987. Direct marketing is the closest thing
yet to perfect marketing. Quite a claim, so let me explain.
What is marketing?
Marketing is defined by the British Chartered Institute of
Marketing as: "Identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably".
There is another, simpler definition given by an American
millionaire many years ago who said: "Find out what people
want and need, and give it to them - and you'll get rich".
Peter Drucker wrote that the aim of marketing is to "know
and understand the customer so well that the product fits him
and sells itself." This is, if you agree with him, perfect marketing.
And it is what direct marketing does better than any other
method.
To give a simple approach, first through the use of postal,
telephone and internet questionnaires it can establish very
cheaply what people say they want.
But as we all know, what people think they want or say they
are often not what they really want and not a good guide to what
they will actually do. That is why a lot of research is very misleading.
Direct marketing solves that problem by clearly answering
the BIG question: will they buy it? It does so by asking them to
do so.
As my old boss David Ogilvy put it, "General advertisers
can only guess. Direct marketers know." By testing different
messages you can see what works and what doesn't.
19

Why guess when you can know?

As a result I can tell you the answers to all sorts of interesting
questions. Like what usually happens if you run long copy rather
than short copy. How long you should have a phone number on
the TV screen if you want to get the most replies. Where your
headline is most likely to get read - and so on.
Peter Drucker also said, "The perfect advertisement is one
of which the reader can say, 'This is for me, and me alone.'"
By definition no mass advertisement can be perfect; but one which
is addressed to individuals via direct mail or e-mail can be.
So it is worth reflecting that the light at the end of the
advertising tunnel may be that of an oncoming train called
direct marketing. You can get run over, get out of the way, or get
on board: but whatever you do, don't ignore it.
It is already much bigger than traditional advertising. And
almost all traditional advertising incorporates some means of
response.
So if youre not fluent in this discipline, you really should be.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Direct marketing is an ideal way to target and acquire

the right kind of customers the ones most likely to
spend the most money.
The customer you have got is from 3 to 8 times more
profitable than an identical person who is not a customer.
Spend your time and money where it does most good.
Remember to key your every message in every media
to track your results.
There is no excuse for NOT measuring especially
online where its so easy.

20

HELPFUL IDEA 2:
A CRM checklist. Or a test: are you sober?
CRM systems can help or hurt you.
Dont fall for marketing automation mania. Many have lost
a fortune trying to make computers do all the work. But
computers can only do what you tell them. Not the opposite.
And no system can think for you.
DO YOU BELIEVE in magic?
Marketers tend to. They are suckers for miracle cures - and
here's why.
We all know our customers are lazy. That's why the words
"quick" and "easy" always increase readership of any headline.
Show them how they can do something - lose weight, learn
a language - with less effort, and you probably have a winning
proposition.
You must package it well, though - preferably with an
impressive name.
So it's not listening to and repeating words and phrases; it's
"programmed learning". That makes you feel you're doing
something important, doesn't it?
Why smart people do dumb things
Guess what? Marketers are just as lazy as customers - hardly
surprising, as they are customers every day. Most (as I learned
from asking them to define it in many countries) are too lazy to
21

even learn what marketing is - let alone what "direct marketing"

means.
Anyhow, that word "direct" ... doesn't it sound distressingly
close to direct mail? And we all know what that means, don't
we? Junk. Ugh. That certainly doesn't sound very flattering,
does it?
CRM sounds much better. People love it. Though I cannot
for the life of me see how it differs from what I've always done.
Mind you, it took me about nine years to get any good at
what I do, whereas a few years ago Oracle's ads said: "Start today
and have global customer relationship management in 60 days."
Sounds a lot better than hard work, doesn't it? Mr. Super
CRM would whiz into your office and take care of everything for
you! No wonder it took off.
Many firms started CRM divisions before even knowing
what the heck it really was - or meant to their business.
No wonder that a few years after it first came into fashion,
the US magazine Advertising Age reported that over 70% of
firms who tried it said it didn't work.
I shall discuss why in a moment, with some good, practical
advice you can act on from somebody who has specialised in this
field.

A little reminder that miracles only happen in the movies.

The word 'loyalty' is often used about CRM. But as a former

chairman of Marks & Spencer observed, "Customers are not loyal
22

nor should they be. We have to earn their loyalty every day".
His firm forgot that and it nearly ruined them.
Sober people know the obvious: nobody sane wants a relationship with their bank or supermarket. They have enough
trouble getting on with their families. And a "programme"
won't cure any dodgy relationship.

The intelligent use of data does pay. Here is a good example. Ocado sent my
partner Marta this, based on things she had bought before.

CRM schemes fail above all because your business lives or

dies on its attitude to customers. And a quick fix doesn't change
attitudes.
So here is check list for you. It was put together by my
associate Peter Hardingham, who worked with me on and off for
20 years, and revised by me because I interfere with everything
that leaves my office.

23

Is CRM right for you? A 15-minute quiz

Step 1
Unless you have answered these four questions, there is absolutely
NO point in boarding the good ship CRM.
Do you really know what your customers want?
Do you know what they think you promise them? Are they
the same things?
Can you clearly identify these desires and beliefs, before and
after they have become customers?
How will you find out? Do so before anything else!
Step 2
Set realistic expectations, and deliver what you promise or you
can end up worse off than if you never started.
Can you deliver what your customers want - and, just as
important, what they think you promise?
If not, what can you deliver now, and in the future?
If it is in the future, how quickly? And how will you
keep them happy in the interim?
Step 3
A customer in the dark is an angry customer. A customer in the
know can end up buying more.
At what points in the buying process will you tell your
customers what they want to know?
About their order?
To reassure them?
Step 4
Can you identify the points from step 3 in every customer
transaction?
24

Are you sure your IT team can deliver?

If you have retail outlets, can the staff get this information
- quickly and easily?

Step 5
Many firms still have separate databases for customer and
transactional information If your marketing database can't access
both, you're in trouble.
Can you record what happens at all every point in
the transaction?
On a database all those who may need to know can access?
The moment of truth.
Did you answer the first 5 steps mostly 'yes'? If so, you stand a
chance of CRM working for you. If you said mostly 'no', stop
right now and get it right.
If you're talking to CRM consultants politely ask them to
leave. Their time is expensive, and you'll lose your shirt.
Step 6 - start the ball rolling
Tell your customers what you plan to do
Manage their expectations
Involve, motivate and train all your staff
Make sure everyone - particularly retail staff - gets
the same respect
Step 7 - attend to detail
Remind yourself what you've promised, and deliver it. Often,
essential processes are not part of firms' structures. They don't
appreciate what skills and structures you need.

If this is an incentivised scheme, how will points, miles or

25

other benefits be allocated, captured, and communicated to

the customer?
How will redemptions be handled?

Step 8
Most customers won't tell you they are unhappy. They tell their
friends - and walk away.
Set up a monitoring process in your company
Make sure you identify any weak links that appear
in the chain
Step 9
Ask your customers how they think you're doing
Loyalty can improve just by making it easy for them to tell
you what they think
Allow your customers to suggest improvements. It's the best
research you'll ever get
Step 10 - it doesn't stop
Don't imagine this is something you just "put in place".
Keep listening to your customers
Keep learning from your customers
Keep refining your system
Keep training and re-training your people
When should you refer to these questions?
When your IT director says, "We've got this wonderful CRM
software..."
When the board says, "That's a brave move you're making
there, this CRM stuff..."
Just take out this quiz, and re-read it. You'll know more
26

than many CRM consultants. You might even keep your job.
P. S. I quoted Ocado earlier. They fail to do one essential, very
simple thing with their database. I believe it is costing them
millions.
P.P.S. If, like many, you have fallen in love with social media,
you might end up making the same mistake as the CRM
groupies.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

CRM is a diary of customers life with you and only

useful if you use it to help them.
It is not something you set up overnight.
If you think CRM is right for you, get going.

27

HELPFUL IDEA 3:
How NOT to choose an agency
If you want to waste your money and time have a beauty parade of
prospective agencies. If you want results, do what smart marketers do: test.
Theres a much quicker and smarter way to choose the
right agency than going for the people you like. Test your
candidates. With real work.
ONCE UPON A TIME, I used to bang out 6 or 7 articles a
month for sundry marketing magazines around the world.
Now I write two or three times as many, only most are called
blogs.
Someone once asked me how I managed to find things to
write about. "No problem," I replied. "I just have to flick through
any marketing publication and I'm bound to find something
absurd or stupid to comment on within minutes."
This came back to me when a while ago day I read with
some amusement how a man who worked for me years ago had
chosen a new agency for his big account.
Here's what made me laugh.
1. The whole process took over six months.
2. It was a "five-way pitch".
3. The agency he chose was staffed entirely by people he had
worked with before.
Dr. Johnson said of sex: "the expense is damnable, the position
ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting."
This came to mind when considering this pitch, with three
other thoughts.
28

First I wondered on what criteria the agency was selected. It

was hard to tell from what I read. It seemed that the winners
had "the right mix of planning and creative skills" - and I should
hope so.
I was at least glad that the usual reason - "personal chemistry"
- didn't creep in; after all, if you've worked with people already
that should be no problem.
I also wondered: how did the people feel in the agencies that
weren't stuffed with this chap's pals?
(By the way, don't go running away with the idea that this
is one of those sad sour grapes pieces for seven years my
colleagues and I worked for this firm's chief competitors, so my
interest is purely professional).
The third thing I wondered was: how did this tortuous
process affect what was going on in terms of marketing?
Just imagine all the meetings, the jargon-crammed documents
written and read, the time spent seeing and discussing all the
initial list of likely agencies before winnowing them down to a
short list.
Then think of all the interminable presentations - which
merge into one big blur of smiling faces and PowerPoint shows,
believe me. I imagine, too, that the people who tell you which
agencies to see got paid handsomely for their time.
Anyhow, in the end, what happened? An agency was chosen
on the basis of people knowing each other and an idea that
seemed plausible enough to make them all think or hope will
work.
What might all this money, time and energy have produced
if devoted to marketing? Ill explain what I mean by that in a
moment.
Think about it.
STOP THE INSANITY
The one thing I'll wager did not happen is the one thing that
should have. The one thing - and the only thing - that matters.
29

They should have conducted tests.

It is insane to choose an agency for any other reason than
results in a business where you live or die on them - which this
one does.
For a lot less, and a lot quicker the client could have asked
a few agencies to create some material to test - and paid them,
too. By now he would have an agency - and something that
worked.
But what did actually happen?
There was probably another few months spent while they
did all this with the chosen agency - without doing the intelligent
thing - testing their work against others.
Since the guy used to work for me I hoped (though not too
earnestly) it worked out for them all - because if not, the pleasure would indeed be fleeting - just like the tenure of the average marketing director.*
And I have just explained the chief reason why. What's more,
what I'm talking about can be adapted to any kind of marketing,
not just the direct kind.
An old friend once worked for Charles Revson, the founder
of Revlon. I asked him what Revson was like to work for.
"He was a nightmare" said my friend. "They used to drag
marketing guys out on stretchers with bleeding ulcers after
working with him for three months. But I'll tell you one thing.
He tested everything - even the price."
* Since I first drafted this the firm in question has staggered
along, with a lot of financial woe.
So how SHOULD you choose an agency?
Having got that bit of spleen about pitching off my teeny
little concave chest, you may wonder how you should choose an
agency.
This is what I think.
Do your research. Look out for work you like that has got
measurable results - and only talk to agencies who get results.
Ignore those that just win awards unrelated to measurable
30

results. And be damn careful to look into the basis on which

they say they got those results.
Look at agency websites. Try to find good ones (not easy most try to be too bloody clever for their own good - or yours).
Look at who their clients are. Look at their work, if any,
results if any - and client testimonials. Ring up their clients and
ask what they think
Make a short list, no more than 5, preferably less.
Go to their offices. You won't learn a damn thing sitting in
yours.
Ask them to take you through one or two success stories and
a failure. Get them to explain what went right and why - and
vice versa. Don't let them get away with vague waffle; make
them be precise.
If they say they don't have any failures, walk out.
Explain what you want. See what they say. Does it make
sense? Do you like them? Yes: it is best to do business with people
you like.
Ask them who precisely will work on your business and
what they will do. Make sure you meet them, not just some flash
bullshitters with fancy titles.
Now, choose the two or at most the three agencies you like
best, and ask them to create something to test. Pay them. Do
you work for nothing?
Doesn't that make more sense than having a committee of
noddies making the decision?

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Buying advertising services is like buying anything

else. First, you test.
Dont fall for hip offices or sexy account handlers.
Buy brains, not looks.
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

31

HELPFUL IDEA 4:
What a dead dictator can teach you about marketing
Fame may help sales, but its not everything. You need proof.
Perhaps the easiest way to increase your advertisings selling
power is simply to add more proof: testimonials, as seen
on TV, mentions in press, experts statements, associations
favorite. Research. Specific sources. Faces of happy
customers...
DO YOU RECOGNISE this man?

I only ask because one of my colleagues didn't recognise

him. So in case you didn't, look at this.

Yes. It's the late glorious leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

32

Where did he go wrong? Why is he dead?

Above all, because he made one fatal mistake.
He told the truth.
But nobody believed him, because he didn't prove it was
true.
He said "I have no deadly weapons" - which was true.
Nobody believed him because he wouldn't let UN weapons
inspectors look everywhere they wanted to - which would have
shown he was not lying.
Whereas Bush and Blair lied. But they got away with it
because Saddam never proved they were lying.
I weep to think of the countless innocents slaughtered as a
result - I spent quite a while worrying because my stepson did
two tours in Iraq as a U.S. marine.
Now, your response rates may not be a matter of life and
death. But your business or your career may depend on them.
So don't imagine that people will believe what you say just
because you know it's true.
As David Ogilvy remarked, "Why should anyone take the
word of an anonymous copywriter?
I sometimes think the most underrated weapons of all in our
business are testimonials, guarantees, independent verification proof.
Are you using them enough?

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

The more proof you have, the better you do.

Truth isnt enough. Prove it.
If a well known name is all you needed to get rich,
wouldnt Hitler be the worlds most profitable brand?

33

HELPFUL IDEA 5:
If you write well as this charming man,
call me, you are hired
Read it and weep then copy.
Its surprising how much better your copy will be if you try
to be a little more human. Sounds elementary? The most
powerful things usually are. Heres a superb piece of personal
communication that sells.
SOME TIME AGO I did a seminar for 11 Virgin Wines people.
They said they learned a lot (8 "fabulous" ratings, 3 "very
good") but I learned a lot, too.
I always do from one man who was there, and who is just
brilliant.
Not surprising, because he founded the business - and before
that ran Virgin Finance. Now he has started another business,
Naked Wines which is going through the roof.
After the seminar, he sent me this e-mail. Read it and weep,
as I did.
Why is so little of my stuff as good as his?
But when I read something this good, I wonder what I can
learn - and copy
From: Rowan Gormley [mailto: Rowan.Gormley@virginwines.com]
Sent: 12 July 2007 10:03
To: Drayton Bird
Subject: Help me keep my job. Please
Dear Drayton,
I would like to offer you a case of sensational, very hard to find wines,
34

at half-price, a ludicrously low 3.17 a bottle. Why?

Well, some unkind people think that I spend all my time drinking
great wines, in gorgeous places, with delightful people. And I resent
that. Probably because it is so true.
The only bad thing, is that the best winemakers are the worst salesman
- and the best salesman are lousy winemakers.
And so to do my job (which is to find you wines that are better than
you can buy at your local supermarket, for less money, by the way) I
have to ignore the slick salesman with their massive marketing budgets.
To do my job properly, I have to discover the little guys. The winemakers who are too passionate about making brilliant wine to worry
about how they are going to sell it. The kind of people who will get up
at 2am to pick grapes by the full moon, to get the extra ounce of
freshness. But won't get out of bed to see me when I come knocking on
the door.
To get their attention (and therefore their wine) we decided to invite a
group of our "in the know" customers to club together. After all a few
thousand people knocking on the door are going to get a lot more
attention than little old me.
That initial band of 2000 customers has now grown to 30,000
members.
Here is what they have to say about being a member of our Club.
"I had no idea there were so many delicious wines that I had never
tried"
"I am blown away. Just a fantastic service"
So what is in it for you?
35

Well to start with, we would like to offer you a welcome case at half
the normal price. A saving of 40. Why? The more members we have,
the better we can buy, the better we buy the more members we can have.
And then every quarter, after tasting our way through literally
thousands of wines, and we will pick out the absolute best for our
members. We will write to you to tell you about the wines we have
selected. You can then change the case in any way you want (more of
this, less of that, or even no case at all). OR sit back and relax, and
we will ship them to you.
And the best bit...after you have tried the wines, members get a
minimum of15% the price that the general public pay. So you get the
lowest possible prices, on the wines you have chosen, out of the wines we
have chosen, out of the 1000's that we have tasted.
Is there a catch? Let me think....er....no. This is not one of those
ghastly book clubs. If you don't want the wines, all yo u have to do is
say so. We will refund your money instantly, without fuss, if you are
not happy with the wine, the service or anything else. We will even
come and collect the wines off your doorstep if you want us to.
So what makes this so good?
1. Great subject line. Surprising, makes you want to know more.
And everyone likes to help.
2. Starts with an irresistible offer.
3. Bags of charm - makes you laugh.
4. Relevant surprise: the contrast between those who sell and
those who make is so clever and appropriate.
5. That theme is carried through.
36

6. Convincing when you read about the growth of the number

of customers plus the testimonials.
7. Then a wonderful wrap up that explains what a great deal it is.
8. And a great guarantee.
Marvellous stuff!
If you study his approach, you'll do well, I promise.
PS A confession:
"I'm not as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I
ever was" is a joke I once had on my business cards.
The truth is that my seminars always get very good ratings
- but the Virgin rating was unusually high. I'll have to work
hard to beat it.
But if you want an intimate seminar like that, which was in
our rather cramped offices, let me know at:
drayton@draytonbird.com, give me time to prepare something
special for you, and I'll try and improve.
P.P.S. The copy I just quoted was in text with no pictures. Later
they tested the same approach in HTML with pictures. It didnt
work as well. Text usually does better than fancy visuals in
emails to prospects.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

To improve your ad, try to improve your offer first.

You can be charming without being a comedian.
The most effective communication is personal: from
me to you.

37

HELPFUL IDEA 6:
Sushi and the future of brands
Building your brand is work.
It doesnt end with a written strategy, it starts there.
Heres what you can learn about marketing from eating sushi.
WHAT CAN A BOX OF SUSHI teach you about the future of
brands?
A lot of people think I lunch every day in smart restaurants,
me being a "guru" and all.
Alas, not true - though I used to, and don't regret a drunken
moment of it.
The other day, I had sushi from Pret a Manger.
Years ago one of their founders came to a seminar I ran for
the Institute of Direct Marketing, so I would love to say their
astounding success owes something to me.
But I doubt it. Because what they do well besides bloody
good food is attend to detail - and they do a complete selling
job, especially to the most important people.
Who are these important people?
They are, as I'm sure you know, their customers. Not their
prospects. And not just any customers. The ones who just
bought and carried their food to the table, or in my case to the
office.
If you could read the little black and gold messages on my
lunch, you would see that one tells why their wasabi - the ginger
mustard you eat with sushi - is a rather muddy colour, unlike the
bright green you get with most sushi.
It's because they don't use, as they say, "a colouring called
Brilliant Blue E133. Yuk!" - and how right they are to tell that
38

to their customers, many of whom care more than average about

their health.
The other message is all about the ingredients and even the
fact that the boxes are Japanese.
So here's my helpful idea with a rider:
It is the piling on of convincing detail at the right time to the most
important people that builds a great brand.
It is also what leads to copy that works. Every reason you can give
to someone to buy your product is a sales made that you wouldnt have
made otherwise.
But when those reasons are given to people who have already bought
and who therefore are your best future prospects they are a powerful
weapon indeed.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

When you have figured your brands positioning on

paper, dont assume your job is done.
Why not go and buy an Innocent smoothie, read the
copy on their bottle, and think about it.

39

HELPFUL IDEA 7:
One of these 99 words could slaughter your emails
Know the words that could stop you from making money you deserve.
Things that work in direct mail usually work on email - but
there are exceptions. Unfortunately some of the most powerful sales words like FREE may sometimes get you in trouble.
PROBABLY THE MOST SUCCESSFUL creative formula in
any medium is 'problem-solution.'
In most thrillers, the plot revolves around problems being
solved - e.g., the hero is falsely accused of a crime and will be
executed if he doesn't find the real murderer.
In classical music, the fulfillment comes when the music
moves from an unsatisfying dissonance to a final consonance
where everything seems to come together.
In marketing messages you have the before and after too:
lined face, smooth skin; dirty floor, clean floor; poor, rich - and
so on. You see it all the time in headlines and TV commercials.
Generations of copywriters (like me) have worked like mad
to devise good problem solution headlines. And they worked
very well in internet subject lines - to start with.
But spam has killed many of them. Here are 99 words or
phrases that can stop your messages getting through, compiled
by Jordan Ayan of SubscriberMail.
Jordan is a Guru, just like people keep telling me I am - but
at least he has the right kind of name for the job.
1. 100% free
40

2. 50% off
3. act now
4. all words that relate to sex or pornography
5. all words that related to cures or medication
6. amazing
7. anything that looks like you are YELLING
8. apply now
9. as seen
10. as seen on Oprah
11. as seen on TV
12. avoid
13. be your own boss
14. buy
15. call now
16. cash bonus
17. cialis
18. click here
19. collect
20. compare
21. consolidate
22. contains $$$
23. contains word "ad"
24. credit
25. Dear Friend
26. discount
27. don't delete
28. double your anything
29. double your income
30. e.x.t.r.a. Punctuation
31. earn
32. earn $
33. earn extra cash
34. easy terms
35. eliminate debt
36. extra income
41

37. fast cash

38. financial freedom
39. for only
40. for you
41. FREE
42. free
43. free access
44. free gift
45. free info
46. free instant
47. free offer
48. free samples!
49. friend
50. g a p p y t e x t
51. get
52. get out of debt
53. hello
54. herbal
55. hidden
56. home based
57. hot
58. information you requested
59. instant
60. levitra
61. life insurance
62. limited time
63. loans
64. lose
65. lose weight
66. lower your mortgage rate
67. lowest insurance rates
68. make money
69. medicine
70. mortgage
71. multi level marketing
42

72. notspam
73. now only
74. numerical digits at the end
75. offer
76. online degree
77. online marketing
78. online pharmacy
79. only
80. open
81. opportunity
82. promised you
83. refinance
84. removes
85. reverses
86. satisfaction
87. search engine listings
88. serious cash
89. starting with a dollar amount
90. stop or stops
91. teen
92. you're a winner!
93. undisclosed recipient
94. valium
95. vicodin
96. winner
97. work from home
98. xanax
99. your family

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

This list could be obsolete by the time you read this,

because technology changes every day.
Test, test, test.

43

HELPFUL IDEA 8:
How to sell to businesses (plus a tip on dealing with geeks)
If you treat people as people, youll do well.
If you struggle to sell to businesses, you could making this
common almost universal mistake.
I DON'T KNOW IF YOU READ the agony column in papers
and magazines but I have my own.
I get lots of questions from people, and just occasionally I
come up with an intelligent answer.
One is quite common, in one guise or another. So when a
reader from IBM in Slovakia asked me it, I thought I'd show
you what I said. Here's her e-mail:
What do you think about being emotional regarding IT people in
B2B - managers/geeks, etc.
I wrote an e-mail and asked around what people thought ...I tried
to use emotional words balanced with dry technical "must be there"
descriptions....
And many of the comments were a bit like: "Don't assume that IT
people are stupid...they hate such words...
So as an expert what do you say?
I replied:
IT people are (as far as we can see) quite human.
44

They love, hate, laugh, fear, hope, have ambitions - and so on.
We've done a fair amount of work for a very big firm called Tekronix
on their copy. I actually did a seminar for them in Oregon.
They sell highly sophisticated testing and measuring equipment
- similar types to the IT folk - and what we suggested seemed to work
very well.
We find that combining emotional and practical benefits works, and
it pays to speak in plain English, not techno-gloop - but you must be
very clear and strong on the practical features.
In fact that excellent US expert Bob Bly states that he has found this
is one kind of business where features matter more than benefits.
As to whether IT - or any other people - are stupid or clever, here is
one fact and one golden rule.
1. Some are stupid, some are clever but you need to persuade all of
them.
2. Therefore, write so clearly that even the stupid ones understand because the clever ones will too.
Also, do what you would in normal life when talking to someone. Be
polite. Don't make it obvious that you think someone may be stupid.
In copy the magic phrase is, "As you know" at the start of a sentence
where you say something everyone should know - but perhaps many
don't.
What about jargon? Use enough to let people know that
youre on their wavelength, or they wont respect you.
Just to end this on a suitable note, here's an IT joke you may like.
45

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He

reduces height and spots a man below.
He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can
you tell me where I am?"
The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon,
hovering 30 feet above this field."
"You must work in IT," says the balloonist.
"I do," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is
technically correct, but it's no use to anyone."
The man below says, "You must work in management."
"I do," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or
where you're going, but you expect me to be able to help. You're
in the same position you were before we met, but now it's my
fault."

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Even geeks are people, although it could be

sometimes hard to believe.
Even bosses are people, although it could be
sometimes harder to believe.
Write so clearly that even the stupid will understand
- because the clever will too.
A common mistake in selling to businesses is to use
too much jargon, not too little.

46

HELPFUL IDEA 9:
Why the profit is seldom in the first sale
To understand the lifetime value of your customer is magic.
To ignore it is a sin.
How one man went to jail before he understood this secret of
success.
"THE DEVIL HAS ALL the best tunes" - old saying.
I hope this isn't going to shock or surprise you, but you
probably know already that if you want to know how to sell online,
the people who know most are those who sell 'adult' material.
However, I'm not talking about
that today. I'm talking about this ad,
or rather the business that ran it, from
which you can take note of something
simple but important.
This ad was sent to me by Lawrence
Bernstein whom you can reach at
http://www.infomarketingblog.com
Lawrence runs a service any serious
creative person can benefit from - he has
a file of great ads going back 80 years,
all of which teach important lessons.
The man in the ad, Ralph Ginzburg, He went to jail but came back as a
financial newsletter publisher
was - back in the Swinging '60's - a
who
understood the value of a long
pioneer in two wildly different fields term customer.
'adult material' and investment advice.
I suspect his lewd offerings were far milder that what you see
in the Daily Sport every day, but after he got out of jail, he
47

started Moneysworth, which offered investment and financial

advice..
In this case, the lesson is not so much about the ad, but
about three facts:
1. His recruitment advertising never made any money
2. His newsletter never made any money
3. He made his money out of the things he sold to his subscribers
This means he knew how much money he could afford to
lose on getting customer, because he knew what they would buy
eventually and what their purchases would make him.
If youre curious about such things, I can tell you that each
person who gets my helpful ideas is (at the time of writing)
likely to give me about 8 of profit over the next year. Some
never buy anything for four years and then do there is a lesson
in that, too.
The moral, and the helpful idea being: focus on the longterm value of a customer, not the profit from a sale.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Think long term success, not one shot sales.

Try to build your business around this principle.

48

HELPFUL IDEA 10:

Never forget why it is called direct response
Take advantage of personal direct media.
(Oh, and don't be so damned idle).
SOME TIME AGO, I GOT A MESSAGE from somebody called
Marcus Noreply.
He (or it, if it was a machine that was talking to me) was
promising me that I would Start Generating New Sales Today.
Here's the message:
Dear Drayton Bird
As you may the new buzz term in direct marketing is "Pay Per
Action", a markerting service that give your business the opportunity
to enter into 24/7 bespoke targeted marketing campaigns Without the
Risk.
How does it work?
A Pay Per Action Marketing account through C8W will allow your
organisation to enter into regular scheduled marketing campaigns
boosting both your brand and more importantly your sales.
OK so whats the difference?
the difference being that unlike more traditional methods where you
pay for everything regardless of the result, with a Pay Per Action
account you pay only for the acitivity generated and not the marketing
itself. Therefore if for whatever reason the campaign was unsuccessful
49

then it would cost you nothing.

What types of campaigns are included?
As a C8W Pay Per Action customer you will be assigned a dedicated
Marketing Consultant to assist you in building well presented and
targeted direct mail campaigns that when delivered through the
techniques detailed below will instantly start to generate new
potential customers for your business.
Services include:
Traditional Direct Mail
Telemarketing
Email Marketing
Fax Marketing
Search Marketing
Contact C8W UK today to find out how your business can start to
benefit from Marketing Without The Risk!
Please use the "Make Contact" link below to make contact with a
C8W UK representative and begin the process of taking your sales
and marketing programme to the next level.
Yours sincerely,
The Business Development Team
C8W UK
0870 922 0584
Frankly, I would be very unlikely to do business with Marcus
Noreply, for a number of reasons.
The first is that these machines that spew out messages but
give no name you can reply to irritate the hell out of me. The
50

whole point of direct response is that it gives you chance to build

a relationship with people.
And by people, I mean individuals.
If I wish to talk to someone, I want to know who they are not a team, not an anonymous UK representative: a real live
human being with a real name.
I am not an eccentric in this; everyone is like that. A name
increases response; it's that simple. A face will increase it further.
A signature, further still.
Next, if anyone wants me to use their services, they should
show some slight dawning glimmers of competence.
Consider the fact that the copy itself is very poor, full of jargon
and clichs and makes neither a complete nor a persuasive
argument.
On top of that there are two literals, three grammatical
errors and one missing word in it. Quite an achievement in 237
words.
Even schoolchildren have heard of spell-check and know
they should read their work before submitting it. Damned idle.
And the shame of it all is that they have a very interesting
promise. But why should I imagine they can sell for me if they
can't sell themselves?
Actually I've decided that illiteracy and sloppiness rule
among these firms. Here's another one. Four mistakes in the first
three paragraphs. Way to go, bozo!
att: Drayton Bird Partnership
Hi,
Emedia produce Email Stationery for Companies, and we are
interested in quoting for producing yours?
The Email Stationery Emedia produce does not contain the images as
all the image content of your template is embedded preventing any
rejection from the recipients server and ensuring high speed travel.
51

The Email stationery we produce for companies, are the same

e-letterheads that the large blue chips companies are now implementing
(see examples http://emedia-solutions.co.uk/emailexample.htm )
providing a professional letterhead for your email correspondence to be
sent out on while ensuring reliability in transit.
We can also animate your existing logo to give that cutting edge
presentation. (See samples http://www.emedia-solutions.co.uk/logo.htm )
You wouldn't dream of sending hard copy correspondence out without
using your company's pre printed stationery, you can now send your
emails out on your company's stationery 100% reliably and for a
negligible cost.
You provide us with your artwork, either in hard copy or an emailable
version (We can lift artwork from your website if you like), we send
you a proof, once approved, we provide a personal self installing download which will incorporate your letterhead into your emails, giving
all your staffs correspondence a professional identity.
If you would like to know more information or to place your order then
use the website links below.
If it is someone else within your organisation who would decide on this
then please forward them this email.
Email letterheads are compatible with Outlook and Outlook Express,
the most widely used email software. You can select to use your
E-letterhead or de-select whenever appropriate, once installed your
E-letterhead can be used whenever you want.
To find out more about this service use our website link below or give
us a call on 01782 444821.
At Emedia we also provide a whole host of other Web related services,
52

bespoke online ordering systems, Online Web traffic control systems,

Online Training Systems, Online Contact database Management with
automated emailing, if you would like us to explore how we can help
your entire online presence then give us a call, and allow us to explore
how we can help your business.
Regards
Adam Ward-Best
So, having warned me they are sloppy by not writing decent
English, they never really tell me the benefits of their services
and try to sell too many things anyhow. Any one of those mistakes
can kill sales.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Stand out by being personal.

If you can't write decent English why should people
think you can do anything else well?
Tell people exactly what you offer. You may know but
they don't.
Many companies go great lengths to avoid any direct
contact with their customers. Take advantage of their
stupidity.

53

HELPFUL IDEA 11:

A business lesson from Dumbledore
Dont lock yourself into long binding contracts.
Procurement experts will hate me for this. The big agencies cant
imagine a world without them. But I recommend relationships
with your business partners based on competence, not
exclusive contracts.
WHAT MATTERS MOST to your business? Tidy arrangements?
Or a few extra million profit?
A while ago I got myself up in fancy dress to do a seminar
for a client who was holding a training programme in an old
castle.
You can see the result below; and before you ask, no, I'm
not supposed to be an old ruined castle; the theme was Harry
Potter, and I went as Professor Dumbledore.
Afterwards I had a most revealing chat with someone there
for whom we were working. I wanted to
know the answer to something that had
long puzzled me.
The firm she works for is huge - a
household name. Eight years ago I did
some copy for them that saved one of their
divisions from closing down.
I was pleased as punch - in fact I may
even have mentioned this vaguely in one
Who's behind the
of these messages. And naturally I
beard?
thought they would start sending us a torrent of highly paid
work.
54

But no. It never happened. Why? They only call on me

when theyre in a desperate hurry.
The reason is simple. They have a mandate from their bosses
that they are only to deal with a particular agency.
God alone knows what it's cost them, as she said getting
good selling stuff from that firm is like pulling teeth. She
thought it was a bit stupid - and so do I.
Bean-counters imagine that giving all your business to one
firm creates economies of scale. What is often produces is bland
stuff and what I can only call economies of quality
Now, before you say, "God, Drayton's just having a good
moan" - which I am - let me tell you how one of my former
clients managed this. I hated it, but it's hugely sensible.
They had continuing relationships with various suppliers.
But they were never exclusive. When we started working for
them ago we managed to come up with something that became
their control mailing and door-to-door piece.
I didn't write it - wish I had - one of my colleagues did, with
a bit of interference from me. Every three months we tried to
beat it. And every three months they commissioned someone
else - sometimes two or three agencies - to try and beat it.
Nobody ever did, for seven years.
I hated this regular challenge. I wished they would do what
the first client I mentioned does: give us all the jobs. But my
goodness, it made us work hard!
One of the keys is not just that you feel challenged. It is that
once you have proved yourself, they keep using you. You don't
have to win every time. But you are under pressure to try hard.
Makes sense to me. Especially when you think carefully
about the alternative, which means locking yourself out of who
knows how many millions of profit - just for the sake of having
tidy arrangements.
P.S. Heres the laugh. Since I wrote this that client decided to
give all their business to one agency. That agency didnt know
55

how to write letters which are the crucial element in direct

mail or door-to-door packages. The client relied on those media
for most of their business. They have since gone broke, and the
managing director has been fired.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Exclusive deals could be more expensive than you

think.
Why not take a few grand and ask one or two new
agencies to create you something to be tested? If they
win, give them more business. Why should a tidy
arrangement stand between you and your profits?

56

HELPFUL IDEA 12:

Do not let new media fool you
Not everything that clicks is gold.
Will you fall for this? Theres always a revolution going on in the
marketing industry. Now its the internet. That is why many say
the principles of selling have changed. Where do you stand?
HERE IS SOMETHING YOU and I have in common.
We both love new things. Everyone does. One proof is that
when John Caples tested which headlines work best 80 years
ago, news headlines came in second after benefit headlines.
And we're right to welcome new things. They can utterly
transform your marketing. Radio and then TV did. Databases
did. The computer did. Personalisation did.
And now, on-line, or digital (choose which fancy expression
you prefer) has done it.
In the UK, on-line sales are growing year-on-year by 50 - 70
percent. Networks like Facebook and YouTube are only few years
old - yet already valued in billions.
By the way, when I first wrote this I confidently predicted
such valuations were crazy. Facebooks share offering proved it.
But our love doesn't just lead to silly commercial decisions.
It blinds us to an important truth.
We assume that something new changes the rules. Nowhere
is this more common than among people who are trying out online marketing.
Two days before I drafted this I was chairing a conference
about e-mail marketing. There were many examples shown. But
the overwhelming majority ignored something very important.
The power of a genuinely personal message.
57

Most examples shown were what I call "internet leaflets".

Dell's stuff is typical, but there are many others.
They are not personal. They really are like something someone hands you in the street or sticks through your letterbox.
Silly. The internet is an intensely personal medium. There
you are, sitting on your own with your own little, intimate
screen.
It is even more personal, I sometimes think, than the post.
We have found that what works in this medium is exactly
what works in direct mail. Messages that seem like letters from
me to you.
Advice from American expert
Interestingly, though, as my friend Denny Hatch said in a note
to me the morning I wrote this:
"Nobody knows how to write a letter any more. Nobody dares be
emotional and let emotions hang out.
Maybe it's not politically correct to be emotional.
But non-emotional letters do not work. The rational, analytical
approach is what goes into the circular or flier.
So if people write rational, analytical letters and the letters do not
work, the logical extension of that thinking is that all letters do not
work.
An old direct mail rule: A mailing with a letter will always outpull a mailing without a letter.
Certainly a premise worth testing in e-commerce.
Betcha the old rule works."
He's right - and no wonder. He is one of the great authorities in
this business, with an excellent blog - www.infomarketingblog.com

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Not everything that clicks, beeps, blinks or tweets is gold.

People are the most interested in benefits, then news.
If you master marketing, it doesnt matter what the
tools are.
58

HELPFUL IDEA 13:

Statistics to make you think...
"If your head is in the refrigerator and your feet in the oven,
on average your temperature is normal."
The internet has impressive numbers. And since its an engineers
invention, you can be sure there will be lots of them. Useful
- and also useless.
STATISTICS ARE NOT THE BEST LOVED - or even trusted types of information.
Politicians massage them, which sounds rather unsexy, and
fittingly, a politician - the great Prime Minister Disraeli damned them most memorably.
"There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies - and statistics,"
he proclaimed.
Most marketing fails, as far as I can see, because people (like
customers) make their decisions on emotional grounds.
That is why there are currently two dangerous, linked, trends.
1. People are pouring tons of money into on-line marketing
especially social media - without looking at either the
context or the results because they feel it's the wave of the
future.
2. They are neglecting "off-line" because they feel it is pass and
unsexy.
In a very perceptive piece, Clayton Makepeace pointed out
why this is foolish - and his analysis starts with the numbers.
59

Here are some particularly relevant extracts.

In 2007 Americans spend $98 billion (ninety-eight thousand million
dollars) a year to buy things on the Web.
But let's take a moment to put some of those numbers into perspective...
First, divide the total amount of online retail sales by the number of
U.S. web users and you'll see: The average web denizen spends only
$38.71 online per month - less than the cost of a single tank of gas.
And that money is being spread out over millions of websites.
For every retail dollar, only about two-and-one-half cents is spent
online. The other 97.5 cents is spent in the real world.
While the value of retail purchases online is rising by 22.5 percent a
year ... Internet companies are increasing their online budgets more
than twice that fast; by a whopping 46.5 percent per year. (And that
doesn't begin to include all the money that's spent offline to advertise
websites on TV, radio and the other media.)
Last year for example, online marketers spent about $13 billion on
banner ads, float-ins, pop-ups and -unders, pay-per-click, AdSense
and to rent e-mail lists. This year, they spent an estimated $19
billion - a $6 billion increase.
But that extra $6 billion yielded only $22 billion in additional
revenues. Deduct product and operating costs and, for many
companies, that's pretty much a wash. In most cases, worse.
These figures are out of date, and the volume of trade going
on line is far greater. But one point Clayton made remains
utterly relevant. Most online advertising is rubbish, which
represents a huge opportunity for talented people who know
what they're doing.
60

Yet here's the rub: marketers are almost all going to on-line
experts for their creative.
And what do they know about selling? Not nearly enough.
But, as I have been pointing out to audiences all over the
world for 12 years now, the medium may have changed, but the
customers haven't - and they respond to the same old stimuli. In
fact here's a fact you might like to think about.
I use almost identical copy for e-mails as for direct mail, just
as I use almost identical copy for door to door as for direct mail
- and in both cases it works just as well. And I write the same
way in my blog as I do in my printed articles.
You might like to think about the implications of that.
You might also like to read anything written by Clayton
Makepeace. He was the highest paid copywriter in the world
until he semi-retired.
No wonder: around the time I first wrote this one of his
little pieces pulled in $60,000 in four hours.
Not to be sneezed at.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Dont be fooled by numbers. Even a tiny web site can

have thousands of page views.
Online marketing is simply accelerated direct marketing.
Study things that work off-line because they tend to work
on-line too.

61

HELPFUL IDEA 14:

Gut Check
Gut instinct is an expensive commodity.
A U.S. study not long ago revealed that the results of $1 billion
of advertising to about 1 billion consumers by 36 major
corporations was only measured by two. The rest relied on their gut.
THERE IS A BOOK OUT called What sticks? Why most
advertising fails - and how to guarantee yours succeeds by Greg
Stuart.
It is a study of how effective some $1billion of advertising
to about 1 billion consumers by 36 major corporations proved.
It seems that only two of those 36 systematically measure
what their advertising does and take action as a result. The others
run on good old "gut instinct."
The good news is that the unkind old saying "I know half
my advertising is wasted - but I don't know which half" is
untrue. It seems only 37 percent is useless, but the culprits have
no idea which 37 percent.
My gut tells me your gut is wrong
And what did the author conclude was the problem - besides the
unreliability of the average gut?
Simple - there was no agreement on what the purpose of the
advertising was. And if you're not sure why you are doing
something, you surely can't tell if it works.
All this reminded me of a comment I received after I savaged
a campaign for St James's Investments in one of these pieces.
The chap responsible sent me a charming message saying he
62

was very proud of the work, and that my insistence on thinking

that the only purpose of advertising is to sell was nave and old
fashioned.
Very appropriately he quoted the writer L. P. Hartley, "the
past is another country."
In vain I quoted every authority I could think of starting
with Raymond Rubicam, "The sole purpose of advertising is to
sell - it has no other justification worth mentioning."
"That was then, and this is now" was the burden of my
correspondent's refrain. So we agreed to disagree.
But I still was not sure the aim of his ads was, though the
word "awareness" crept in at some point. Anyhow, whatever it is,
I hope it was being measured. I have not seen much of St. James
Investments lately an English firm, not the U.S. one with the
same name. I fear they are no longer with us.
I should add that one of my financial clients at the time I
drafted this was - by far - the biggest in its field. They measure
everything by return on investment.
Gut instinct is an expensive commodity, believe me; and as
recession drags on, it is going to be even more pricey.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Before you advertise be clear why you are doing it.

You can measure the selling power of your ads. Theres
no excuse not to.

63

HELPFUL IDEA 15:

Could these tips improve your newsletter?
The best newsletter is personal
- almost like a secret whispered only to you.
Over 40 years ago I ran a newsletter and nearly went bankrupt.
However, I learned important lessons many publishers ignore
today. A newsletter is a letter, not a magazine. Good newsletters
are written from me to you. And they have a private feeling, as
though you are being let in on some secrets; and they look like
real letters, not glossy magazines.
DO YOU HAVE a newsletter?
Well, here's a paradox for you.
1. In front of me I have a copy of The Spectator, 64 pages long.
This weekly costs 2.95 an issue - 30% less if you subscribe
annually. About 100 a year.
2. A friend publishes a newsletter on subscriptions that costs
197 for six 16-page printed issues a year - which are typed
double spaced - or a bit less if you just get the online version.
The writing is nothing much to shout about - whereas The
Spectator has been voted Current Affairs Magazine of the Year,
and employs some of Britain's best journalists.
In terms of how many words you get for your money, goodness knows how much more expensive the newsletter is than the
magazine ... maybe 100 times. Does that surprise you? Yes? But
you may find the reasons for this extraordinary price difference
64

highly instructive.
As you know, practically every organisation has a newsletter.
Most, in my view, are perilously close to rubbish.
The reason is, I suspect that those who produce them are so
busy doing so that they never stop to ask some pretty simple
questions.
The first is this: what is a newsletter?
That may seem such a simple question as to be stupid, but
please bear with me if - even more simply - I divide the word
into two. Clearly, your newsletter delivers - or should deliver news in the form of a letter.
Well as I write this I am looking at a selection of newsletters
from all over the country and asking myself some more simple
questions.
1. How many look like letters?
2. And if they are supposed to be letters, what sort of character
should they have? How should they read?
3. What sort of news should they contain?
The answer to the first question is, again, simple. Hardly
any of them look like letters. Most of them look a sort of minimagazine or a leaflet that got a bit too big for its boots. Quite a
few seem quite expensive little productions, with fancy typefaces. They certainly don't look like letters, and they don't read
like letters.
This begs four more questions:
1. Why is the newsletter such a popular idea?
2. What should be its character - its strength?
3. How come they turn into something else much grander?
65

4. Is that transformation an improvement?

Here are some possible answers.
1. The newsletter is popular, I think, "because everyone has one";
but also because it sounds cheap. quick and easy to produce.
2. Its character should be that, like a letter, it is personal. And
it should indeed be cheap and quick to produce though not
necessarily easy, because good writing is never that easy. And
it should be full of news that people find interesting.
3. But they get a bit grander and more elaborate because ever
since the development of new kinds of printing - usually
related to computers - you can do all sorts of things you could
never do before which is fun.
4. If that takes away from the personal nature and look implied
by the word "letter" it probably is not an improvement. If it
gets too big - well, people have enough to read already.
And here are some
comments about the word
"news".
There are two types of
news. One is the kind that
interests the people who
send it out; the other is the
kind that interests the people
who get it.
The first kind is bad
because nobody except the
How people value information.
sender cares or will read it;
Source: Publishing Newsletters by
the second kind is good.
Howard Penn Hudson.
When I thumb through
the pile of newsletters in front of me, far too much of the news
66

is the bad kind - about the people who send it out; pictures of
chief executives and celebrations - which are of no interest to
people you are trying to influence.
Here are some things to think about.
Good newsletters can charge far more for their subscriptions
than even the best magazines because they are seen as giving
"inside information" to a limited number of people - a community.
No newsletter should be without a very prominent personal
message, in the form of a letter to the readers, that introduces the
content and explains why it is of interest to them.
All the language should be friendly and personal, as in a letter,
not impersonal or official.
The closer it is visually to a letter, the better.
Don't use expensive and elaborate visual work. It isn't
needed, and takes away from the personal nature of a newsletter.
If you really hanker to publish a magazine, look at some like
Grazia or GQ. Then stop and think: do you have the skills to do
that well - as you are competing for people's attention with such
professionals.
Your newsletter should make people feel they belong to a
real community ... one where they can join in and comment, not
one run by other people who like to see pictures of themselves.
By the way, you have now been receiving these little messages
for quite a few months. An amazing number of you have written
saying nice things about them.
And what are they? They are really just newsletters that
come out once very three days. And they follow the rules I have
just mentioned.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Newsletters should be written like personal letters.

A newsletter may bring in very healthy profits if done right.
If you are serious about making money with it, read Publishing Newsletters by Howard Penn Hudson.
67

HELPFUL IDEA 16:

26 reasons why a promising ad failed
Nothing fails like success.
Good times breed bad habits. Bad times breed good habits.
YOU LEARN A LOT MORE from failure than success. Success
leads to complacency; failure makes you try harder. You want
to know what went wrong. Here are a few questions to ask if
something fails.
1. Was the brief clear? And in writing?
2. Did you change it halfway through?
3. Did you allow enough time and money?
4. Was your offering fully, clearly described?
5. Did you explain why you were writing, if it was a mailing or
e-mail?
6. Did you start selling fast enough?
7. Was it too clever - was the message more interesting than the
offering?
8. Was it logical - or emotional. Emotion usually wins hands down.
9. Was it easy to understand? Utterly clear?
68

10. Were the visual and verbal tone appropriate to what you're
selling?
11. Did you say what it is - or what it does?
12. Were the benefits impossible to miss? Did you quantify them?
13. Did you emphasise low price before it sold the benefits?
14. Was it complete? Every reason why given? Every objection
overcome?
15. Did you prove your claims were true?
16. Did you show enough people?
17. Did you demonstrate the benefit?
18. Did you waste money on needless elements?
19. Conversely, was there anything you could have added, but didn't?
20. Did you ask firmly and repeatedly for a reply?
21. Did you tell people exactly what to do?
22. Was there more than one place to order?
23. Was there more than one way to order?
24. Did you repeat your benefits at least three times - especially
when asking for a reply?
25. Was it as easy as possible to reply, register interest or order?
Was the coupon/order device big enough, easy to understand
69

and send off? You didnt ask people to verify or copy one of
those incomprehensible sets of letters did you? Only do that
if you want to make things hard for people or discourage
frivolous replies
26. Was the letter/email strong and personal if possible charming?
God forbid there was no letter if you sent a catalogue or
brochure

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

A formula is better than no formula.

Use checklists.

70

HELPFUL IDEA 17:

Strategy versus tactics
The best long-term profits are made up of
a succession of short-term profits.
Do you need a new strategy? Heres an insight from a successful
marketing pioneer.
OF ALL THE CLIENTS I have worked with, none was better,
cleverer or funnier than Victor Ross, former Chairman of the
Readers' Digest, Europe.
He was originally a copywriter, but had a lot to do with
developing some highly effective direct marketing techniques
like the sweepstake, the yes/no option and the mystery gift.
He once told me an amusing - and
instructive - story about the time he
was sent to a seminar in the US by his
chairman.
On his return, the chairman asked
what he had learned.
He thought for a moment, then
replied, "We must stop short term
thinking and plan for long-term profits".
"Quite so, dear boy," replied the Probably the funniest and
wittiest client I ever had:
chairman. "And the best long-term
Victor Ross, Former
profits are made up of a succession of
Chairman of
short-term profits".
The Readers Digest, Europe.
There is a lot of loose talk nowadays
about strategy, mostly applied to something terribly simple and
really tactical, like what headline to run, and equally often added
to somebody's title to make them feel important.
71

I have always thought that the minute you start to feel

important you are in trouble, but that is another subject.
All I want to suggest now is that Victor was not only witty
but wise. Concentrate on lots of small improvements and you
may find you have no need for anything more ambitious. Find
one small thing to improve every week and I promise you will
not go far wrong.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

See if you can improve many little things. They add up.
Dont get lost in the sea of management jargon.

72

HELPFUL IDEA 18:

More on layout
magic colors and pictures that lift response
Design is not always common sense.
Surprising little changes in layout might bring you startling
results. For example, green doesnt always suggest Go.
YOU KNOW THAT OLD PHRASE "by popular request"?
Well, this is by popular request - one of you asked for more
facts about pictures and illustrations.
Before saying any more let me tell you one thing that often
helps. When you can't afford a letter and a brochure in a direct
mail piece, try an illustrated letter. (You know, of course, that
given a choice between a letter and a brochure, you always use
the letter in preference as it's more personal).
Having said that, here are a few facts, much of them based
on research by Gallup or testing.
1. Cartoons attract most attention. Good on envelopes.
2. Photos convince most. Use them if looks or credibility matter.
3. Charts often attract interest - e.g. weight-loss figures or
interest rates.
4. People look at people. Responses for a business school nearly
doubled when we put the Dean's face in the ads.
5. Men look at attractive women; so do women. But they look
at babies even more.
73

6. Illustrations relating directly to the message work on average

32% better.
7. TV frames from commercials are extremely effective.
8. If you don't illustrate the product or the idea, the ad is 27 % less
effective than average.(That means don't be a clever-clogs)
9. Stereotypes - chatting people, loving couples, smiling sippers
and ecstatic eaters kill ads. They don't develop uniqueness.
10. If the picture has something odd about it, people remember
the message.
11. One big picture usually attracts better than several small ones.
12. Pictures should demonstrate.
13. Before and after pictures are particularly effective.
14. Cut out pictures attract the eye better than squared-up ones.
15. Don't have pictures just for the sake of it; they cost money
and can divert attention needlessly. So they must be relevant.
16. Coupons in ads used to add most conviction. Now that you
often direct people to a website, that means it should be very
prominent. Coupons still increase response.
17. Never use pictures that have nothing to with the product
but seem a clever idea.
18. Visual elements that interrupt may even seem out of
place are hugely effective. For instance, scrawled arrows on
landing pages, flashing words, yellow highlights.
74

19. Do not allow the corporate look to hobble your imagination.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Communicate, dont decorate.

Use pictures to sell, not because someone thinks
A photo would be nice.
Themes can be powerful.
Try a less commercial look and see what happens.

75

HELPFUL IDEA 19:

The only way to resolve every marketing question
If you dont ask people to reply you will never know
how good the ad is. But many people are scared of being put to
the test in the only way that matters through measurement.
When people have read your copy they want to know what
to do. Tell them John Caples.
I AM ASTOUNDED by two things,
First, that people run ads with no means of response.
Second, that even those who do fail to act upon what the responses tell them.
That thought is provoked by the ad below, which I saw
when I was in Australia some time ago.

Under it, the line: "If you really want to touch someone, send them a letter".

I just can't make my mind up about it. I'm puzzled. What

do you think?
76

It is a brilliant idea. I wish I had had it.

But does it sell?
No idea. But I'm sure it would sell better if there were some
means of response.
Research some years ago revealed that simply putting a
coupon in an ad made people trust the advertiser more. I believe
it says to people that you are serious and you have something
worthwhile to offer.
Many years ago I actually took the trouble to measure what
difference it made if you put a coupon in an ad as opposed to
just asking people to write or phone. The answer is that it gets
you 20% replies. The coupon says there is something here for
you.
But, to return to my original point, if you dont have any
means of response, how will you ever know whether your message was effective or not?
I should add that simply measuring responses tells you
which media work best for you. Because of that I can tell you
that social media as at the time of writing are a waste of
money.
Never, ever do anything without having some means of
measuring it.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

To see if your ads work, add a response device.

Dont try to be clever, try to sell.
Do a complete sales job ask for the order.

77

HELPFUL IDEA 20:

Getting a job calls for good
old fashioned marketing.
This is the most popular post I have ever put up.
Getting a job is an old fashioned marketing task.

Sending a CV without a proper sales letter is probably the

biggest mistake you can make when applying for a job. Others
are; failing to understand what you are doing, being too selfcentred and not following-up.
SHE'S ACTUALLY THE DAUGHTER
of a client, who wrote and asked me how
she should write to get a job. I was intrigued
because when we analysed the things people
went to most and stayed at longest on my
old website, one won by a mile.
Can you guess what it was?
It was, of course, "How to get a better job".
Here is the star of this
I'm
kicking myself because it isn't on the
helpful idea, and even
new
site - so we'd better put it on there.
if you don't find it
Anyhow, this is what my client and I
useful I bet someone you
know will.
cobbled together.
Most people never write a more important letter than this yet they're nearly all clueless!
How to write a letter to get a job
Why I would never have employed my own daughter - and what
she should have done.
I bet you can relate to this.
My 19 year old daughter Ally is at a dreadful stage in her
78

life. She's trying to get a job, which means she has to write letters.
Admittedly it's only for a summer job while at university,
but it's still pretty important. But since she is young with hardly
any experience of this part of life, she's at sixes and sevens on
how to go about it.
Let me tell you what happened
She sent her unsolicited CV to a famous jewellery firm she
is pretty keen to work for. I asked her if I could have a look at
what she sent, in case I could help in future.
My heart sank when I read what she had sent, as I knew if
the letter arrived on my desk I wouldn't have wanted to interview
her. I felt like kicking myself, too, since I do sales letters all the
time and here was my own daughter not even getting the basics
right- because I hadn't helped.
And let's face it, a letter to get a job can either start you out
on a career - or fail to do so. This could be the most important
letter she would ever write.
It got me thinking that there must be lots of other parents
out there with children in the same boat so I thought everyone
might benefit if I looked at how Ally could have done a better
job - and she would also do better next time.
If you find these tips useful, please pass them onto any
young people you know who are about to look for a job. They
probably need all the help they can get.
You might even be looking for a job yourself and be a bit
rusty.
Let's look at what she sent in.
The application had no covering letter to speak of except
something along the lines of, "I would like to work for your
company this summer so I am enclosing my CV". This 3 page
statement of facts began like this:
"I am a hard working, intelligent and sharp
person who works well on her feet. The experience
from working in retail has helped me immensely
in becoming very confident in selling goods to a
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variety of people. I have a friendly and approachable

manner and greatly enjoy interaction with members
of the public. I am also responsible and trustworthy,
and work well in a team and on my own."
Four things struck me when I read it.
Because there was no decent covering letter, it felt a bit like
being whacked in the face with a wet fish. There was nothing
linking her CV to the job she was applying for.
Secondly the whole thing was just about her and how good
she thought she was.
There were no obvious benefits to the jewellery shop if they
were to employ her. Thirdly and rather astonishingly there was
no reference to the shop itself, or even the jewellery industry.
Fourthly the whole thing was utterly devoid of any enthusiasm
or passion for the company or its products.
I was dying to tell her she should have sent in a photograph
of herself as people like to see who they might be employing
and it helps to get their attention, but I didn't have the heart as
it was all too late and I didn't want to make her feel too bad.
She is such a good looking kid (Her father would say that
wouldn't he?) that I thought a photo wouldn't do any harm,
particularly as the company sells very costly jewellery.
It was no surprise to me when she didn't get the job - a real
shame as she really wanted to work for that company. You never
would have guessed it though from what she sent in, and that
was where she went wrong, as do thousands of oters every
month.
But the principles involved in getting a job are the same
anywhere, and you can't escape that fact that you have to sell
yourself.
Which brings me to my main point. Never forget:
Getting a job is an old fashioned marketing job: you are
selling yourself and the aim of what you do is to get an interview.

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What does good marketing involve?

Paying huge attention to detail, spending time finding out
about a person and/or organisation, (in this case the prospective
employer) thinking through the benefits of something (the job
applicant) to another person (the employer) - and using your
imagination to increase your chance of success.
Oh, and I should mention one other thing: making an effort.
Sorry about this, but very little comes easily in life, and marketing yourself to get job is no exception. But if you get the job
you want it will be worth it a hundred times over.
So here is my advice:
1. Write a proper covering letter for your CV
2. Under no account ever again should she just send a CV.
3. Send a letter, a proper letter and not just a skimpy "please
find enclosed" letter.
4. Go the whole hog and send a real sales letter which gives every
reason why they should employ you and answers any concerns
or questions they might have about you. Don't be afraid of
going onto a second, or even a third page.
If you don't know what a good sales letter looks like, there
are heaps of examples and suggestions in How to Write Salesletters
that sells by Drayton Bird you can look at.
Talk to the right person - and get their attention.
Think who the best person might be to write to, and find out
their name.
I think my daughter should have got the name of the director
or owner and written to them, in the hope that they would find
her interesting and pass it onto personnel with a comment, "This
person looks good."
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If you have a choice between personnel and a senior person,

go for the senior person; it shows initiative and will get to them
anyhow.
Enclose a photograph.
People always like to see who they might end up employing.
Be enthusiastic - and prove that you are genuinely interested
in them.
You can do this by referring to something you have found out
about the company.
Use your research to show you know about the company and
its activities: they are interested in themselves, not you.
You are trying to get the reader's attention, and you flatter
them by doing this. Nobody, no matter how senior or successful
dislikes flattery, but don't go overboard and gush nonsense - it
will get you nowhere.
How will you benefit the company?
Explain your skills and experience and relate them to the needs
of the company.How will they benefit by employing you?
How can you prove you are any good?
Depending on the job do you have any examples of your work
to send in?
How about some testimonials from teachers, the Brownies,
other employers, any damn thing for that matter. Just something which will help convince the reader that you are worth
seeing.
Make an offer
You can offer to come in do the first two days work for nothing,
because you know that it's expensive to train staff. Can you think
of anything else you can offer them?

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Pay attention to detail

Have a big, confident handwritten legible signature, preferably in
blue ink. You want to be noticed and stand out from the crowd.
If you handwrite the person's name in the salutation this gets
their attention straightaway.
And try having a PS, as this is the most read part of any letter.
You could use this as an opportunity to emphasise how keen you
are to get the job. Or repeat your offer.
For example: P.S. I realise you get many letters like this, and
many would-be employees, which is why I'd love the opportunity
to come and work for a week for nothing
Don't forget the follow-up phone call: make
it easy to hire you
Why not follow up with a couple of phone calls. (Most
candidates dont bother.)
Talk to the important person's secretary or P.A., who is
extremely powerful in these cases.
Once three or four days later to check the letter has arrived
and then again a couple of weeks later to see if there is anything
else they need to know about you. Anything really to remind
them about you.
As a matter of interest, I suggested to my client that even if
her first letter didn't work, a good follow-up might.
I actually proposed this opening:
"My last letter to you failed dismally - because it was awful, to be honest.
So I'm trying again.
Would you like someone so keen to work for you that I'll gladly work for
nothing while you see what I can do?
For instance, I can:
Etc.
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THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Getting a job means you are selling yourself and the aim
of what you write is to get an interview.
Make an offer.
Dont send your CV without a tailored letter.
Persevere.

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HELPFUL IDEA 21:

How NOT to go broke
The road to failure is paved with success.
Five reasons why one client went bust.
FIRST, A CONFESSION.
As a young man I went broke - or rather my businesses all
did - in 1970.
If you want to read about it - and how I then did well, I
have a short book called How Even A Business Idiot Like Me
Made A Million Or Two.
Anyhow, one of my occasional clients just went broke. It was
partly because of the property crash, but I wasn't that surprised,
because they did five stupid things.
1. We wrote some e-mail copy in August; they didn't run it till
October, which cost them a lot of profit, because it beat the
pants off everything else they were doing.
2. They didn't tell us how it did - clients should always do that
as it enthuses and motivates the agency. Many never say a word
unless it flops.
3. They didn't come back for more. Dumb.
4. I told them that if it worked in e-mail it could work in direct
mail and ads. They didn't try mail for another three months and it did work. They never tried it in ads.
5. Here's the MOST stupid thing. They didn't keep a database
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of all the many thousands of prospects who came to their free

seminars. A database of would be entrepreneurs that would be
really valuable.
Why did they do all these dumb things? Because they began
to think they could do no wrong. They were cocky and careless.
As I have decided, the road to failure is paved with success.
But I bet the man behind the company is not suffering. He
had the sense to keep this business separate from his other linked
ventures.
If had done that all those years ago when I went broke, I
would have survived.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Your most valuable asset is your list.

If something works in one medium it may work in others.
Dont forget get to motivate your suppliers
they are people too.

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HELPFUL IDEA 22:

You have a brand why throw it away?
There are two things marketers love to do:
build their brands - and kill them.
What is the job of a senior executive? To stop juniors from
changing everything that works.

This little picture is here to remind you of an old rhyme which runs
"Always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of catching something worse."

I HAVE TALKED BEFORE about the perils of re-branding a

business, a process much loved by marketing directors and often
leading to misery. Today I want to talk about a step beyond
re-branding - re-naming.
This is, I think, even more dubious, because it involves not
just changing the look of a brand, which can confuse people, but
making it vanish.
More and more big marketers keep changing the names of
firms they have acquired for what, as far as I can see, are little
more than reasons of tidiness and, I suspect, conceit.
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It is an international disease, for it happens in many countries.

Many clever people have spent a lot of time trying to calculate
how much a brand is worth. Research shows that a strong one
will persuade people to pay more for something identical except
for the brand name, to keep buying longer, to forgive mistakes,
to put up with price rises - and so on.
How much can this be worth, year after year? I would imagine millions in the case of a large firm, with many customers.
Take for example, Norwich Union.
This venerable insurance firm was around for over 200 years.
It was the largest U.K. insurer. It has been doing very well, too.
Now, however, it now belongs to a firm called Aviva. I have
no idea what Aviva is and am too busy to find out. They sound
like they make health foods or mineral water.
One thing I am damn sure they made is a mistake, because
they have renamed Norwich Union after themselves.
Under any other circumstances would a sensible business
throw away an asset worth millions? I can tell you that a name
like Norwich Union on an envelope will double response as compared to an unknown name
Idiots.
Smart people have bought the rights to what I call ghost
brands brands that had been bought or had gone broke and
were no longer being attached to products and re-launched
them.
As a matter of fact, here's a thought for you.
Give me the rights to the name Norwich Union, and I'd
make money so fast your brain would spin.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Its damn expensive to build a brand. It takes exhausting

years.
But it only takes one new marketing director to kill it.
And killing your brand could be the most expensive
mistake you make.
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HELPFUL IDEA 23:

How you might beat fat blue chip firms
Do not forget to tell people what you're selling, big boy.
Claude Hopkins wrote nearly 100 years ago that when companies grow its only natural from them to want to boast in
their advertising rather than to sell. Its still true. My experience
suggests 99.5 % of businesses cant resist spending money on
what I call creative masturbation brainless advertising
trying only to please its creator, not the prospect.
HERE'S A CHANGE for you.
It's something one of my readers, Rob Watson sent. I think
it is both funny and helpful.

How NOT to do it.

He wrote: "As a reader of your tips and your blog, I just had
to send you this piece of vacuous, disappearing-up-their-own89

backsides, utterly useless piece of advertising from IBM for a

service called Express Advantage at the top of the attached
email.
It starts with a completely pointless headline: "all the blue
without the big". Deep down I suspect even they may be
ashamed of it, which could be why they've written it in all caps
in white for minimal comprehension.
It linked to:
- a page offering you a free book from IBM with a less than
prominent link to register for the book. I can't work out if this
was ill-conceived or they just linked to the wrong page by mistake
- there's not even a hint of a free book offer in the ad.
Either way if you cast your eyes to the left you'll see a link
"About Express Advantage" which of course you will race to
view after being reeled in by that benefit-laden emotion-rich
headline.
Then you get to read the first paragraph explaining Express
Advantage: "More than a set of offerings, Express Advantage is
a fresh new way of doing things. It's a fundamental change in the
way we support small and medium businesses. We listened to your
business and technology issues. We took into account challenges
and opportunities. And we developed something expressly for
you - IBM Express Advantage".
I don't actually remember them listening to my business
and technology issues - I've never even spoken to them, and the
above gives me no clue whatsoever what Express Advantage is,
let alone what's in it for me.
It continues, and gets worse: "Simplicity and economy are
built in to all our solutions, making it easier and more costeffective than ever to compete. Our solutions are designed to
help you access the critical business and technology capabilities
you need to innovate and succeed. It's not a line. It's a promise.
It's that easy."
Im still none the wiser about what they're trying to sell me.
And how do they know that I need to innovate? How do they
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know I haven't got an ordinary, dull, necessary product that

keeps selling year in, year out?
If an agency pitched this kind of work to me I would just
take my marketing budget walk down to the nearest bookmaker
and place the lot on the most generously priced horse I could
find (subject to having two eyes and four legs). Risky, but at least
it wouldn't damage the brand, and it might just pay off big.
Somebody out there signed this off and paid for it. If a doctor
or solicitor did something so negligent they would be struck off
and maybe even face criminal charges. It's as depressing as it is
amusing.
There you are. Proof, if ever you wondered, that big businesses
will never rule the world because THEY'RE TOO BLOODY
STUPID.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Write to your customer not to you.

Show your ad to an idiot and see if they understand.
Your advertising can build or destroy your brand.

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HELPFUL IDEA 24:

Maybe you should ignore direct marketing
PR could get you there faster and cheaper.
When we make the man famous, we make his product
famous, David Ogilvy advised.
Some of the most effective marketing campaigns used PR.
Sir Richard Branson built Virgin on publicity stunts and
still relies on them. Many IT publications seem to exist only
to promote Apple for free. Few things beat good PR.
(But sometimes direct mail might help get it going.)

IT IS SUMMER as I write this. Unusually for England this year,

the sun is shining.
Outside my flat in Chelsea this morning was a big red bus,
with an open top deck. Girls were tying balloons to the railings.
It's a moving party!
"Whose party?" my partner and I wonder - and go to see
what it says on the balloons.
It is being thrown by a new shop on the corner called French
Soles.
My partner laughs. "They don't need to do that. They've
already got it made."
"Why?" I ask.
"Because there isn't a woman between the age of 18 and 45
- which is who they aim for - who don't know who they are,
even though they've only just opened."
"How come?"
"Because they've got products placed and mentions in every
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single fashion magazine I can think of."

You may wonder that she said nothing about direct marketing.
Well, we don't always see direct marketing as the answer to
every problem.
Then I said to her, "What's so good about them?"
She said, "They do nothing but ballerina shoes - or sandals
that are ballerina-style."
If you want to be good at marketing, don't be a one-trick
pony. Learn about every discipline. Yesterday my partner spent
her time doing PR on the internet.
Be known for something special
So there are two very simple suggestion.
First, try to understand all the ways you can succeed, because
one weapon may not be enough.
Second, find something you know about and be a specialist.
That's often the best way to start.
You really want people to automatically associate you with
something you are supremely good at. If you're known for being
fairly good at everything, this is perilously close to being not
very good at anything.
Later you can, if you succeed, start to expand. For example,
in the UK the big supermarket chain Sainsbury's started out as
grocers who were famous for their bacon.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

See if you could get the press to write about you

and your business.
Top marketers master all the weapons, not just one or two.
Try to be known for something special.

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HELPFUL IDEA 25:

How to create a good slogan a guide for masochists
You dont always need a slogan.
Many would be better off without even bothering.
Marketers think they need it. So they spend far too much
time and money than is reasonable to come up with a clever
one. Few things get more attention with the possible
exception of coming up with a new logo or brand name.

WHEN I FIRST ENTERED ADVERTISING in the days when

dinosaurs roamed the earth the word "copywriter" was meaningless
to most people.
Come to think of it, it probably still is, but I had quite a
problem when asked what I did for a living.
My explanation was usually greeted with something like,
"Oh, do you write those slogans, then?" And it was far too
tedious to go into any detail - besides which nobody really cared
anyhow - so I would say "sometimes".
Actually, I have religiously avoided writing slogans for the
most part, because the effort involved is usually a total waste of
time.
The reason is simple. The slogan is an area where marketers'
most foolish, self-regarding obsessions get in the way of
commonsense. The overwhelming majority are little more than
an exercise in corporate masturbation.
My advice is not to waste too much energy on them, because
it is nigh on impossible to find one that will do you any good.
That is because a good slogan is exceedingly hard to coin.
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What makes a good slogan

According to the best authority, the late Timothy R.V. Foster,
a slogan should:
1. Be memorable
2. Recall the brand name
3. Include a key benefit
4. Differentiate the brand
5. Impart positive feelings for the brand
6. Reflect the brand's personality
7. Be strategic
8. Be campaignable
9. Be competitive
10. Be original
11. Be simple
12. Be neat
13. Be believable
14. Help when ordering the brand
It should NOT:
15. Be in current use by others
16. Be bland, generic or hackneyed
17. Prompt a sarcastic or negative response
18. Be pretentious
19. Be negative
20. Be corporate waffle
21. Make you say "So what?" or "Ho-hum"
22. Make you say "Oh yeah??"
23. Be meaningless
24. Be complicated or clumsy
And Finally...
25. You should like it.
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The essential thing to avoid is what my old boss David

Ogilvy called "flatulent puffery" - that is odious boasting.
Bad slogans, like bad advertising, are always easy to find in
the automotive industry. "The car in front is a Toyota"; "Go beyond" (for Land Rover) "The power of dreams" (Honda). "Is it
love?" (BMW) - and so on.
My favourite examples were both for the late, often very late,
British Rail. "This is the age of the train" - when it clearly was
the age of the car or plane; and "We're getting there" - when far
too often we werent.
I have two golden rules.
Unless you can come up with something no-one else can say,
or something nobody has said already, forget it.
Ask yourself if the space or time you use for the slogan could
be used to sell; if so, don't waste it.
It's easy to carp, so here's a good slogan: "Just do it" for Nike
- because the product is all about performance, and so are the
ads.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Because slogans and logos are usually created by committees,

they usually fail to mean anything.
Ask, is this something no else can claim? If not, forget it.
Use the included checklist to get a good slogan you deserve.
Make sure the people judging it understand what they are
suppose to do. Again, a checklist helps.

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HELPFUL IDEA 26:

Never assume in business
Show your work to a stranger; youll be surprised
how that could improve it.
Trying to come up with good ideas is damned hard work.
If youre any good you probably put a lot of effort and emotion
into it. It is not easy to accept criticism. But showing your
work to someone not related to it might make you do better.

How NOT to do it.: How I would improve this brochure?

Read this piece to find out.

I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE a little international flavour

every now and then, so here is an ad I saw when I was in Bulgaria
some time ago - aimed at visitors. See what you think about it.
While I was in Sofia, I was interviewed by a magazine.
Unless you speak Bulgarian (which I certainly don't) you
won't appreciate the intellectual depth, uncanny perception and
wit of my responses to a number of questions.
One of them, however, was: "Have you ever failed in something;
what was it, and what happened?"
I answered that there probably wasn't space in their magazine
97

to list all my failures, let alone describe them in the exuberant,

comic detail they merit.
A marketers curse
However, many were due to what that wonderful retail (and
direct marketing) expert Murray Raphel called "the curse of
assumption."
He pointed out that all too often we assume people know all
about what we are selling when they don't. And if people don't
know what you're selling, they are hardly likely to buy it, are they?
Because we live with what we sell all the time and think
about it constantly, we presume that others do. So we dont even
mention things we know but others dont - which are crucially
important and without which people simply will not buy.
For instance I once wrote a mailing for Management Today
which was wonderful in every respect except that it failed to say
whether it was a weekly or a monthly magazine. The mailing did
reasonably well because what they were doing before was so dire.
But still, pretty damn stupid, eh?
So look at the tasteful, elegant ad I reproduced at the top. It
gives you three useful phrases in Bulgarian. Very helpful.
Except there is no translation. Very silly.
The moral is, always show your stuff to someone who knows
nothing about it and ask if they understand. You'll be amazed
what you can miss out or ignore.
One practical thing to do that is very boring but utterly
necessary is to describe your offering in complete detail for the
benefit of someone whos never heard of it before you start.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Show your work to someone and see if they understand what

youre talking about.
If you dont think their comments are useful, ignore them if
you can.
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HELPFUL IDEA 27:

Dont be vague an unusual advertising lesson from India
Precision matters more than you may think even in romance.
This example brought in 7 ideal marriage candidates.
Why be precise? It makes your ad more credible and effective.
Often it means longer copy and perhaps more time or
space. But are cost and length really what you should be
worrying about?

William Blake

I THOUGHT I'D GIVE YOU a bit of culture; in fact two cultures.

The man in the picture is William Blake, the wonderful
poet and painter, who once said, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot;
To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit."
What he was saying in his typical vehement way, was be
precise.
And to give a demonstration of what he meant, applied to
marketing, let us travel half way across the world, to India.
Wanted: A Brahmin bridegroom for girl under 23
This is a story told to me 21 years ago by the Managing Director of O & M Direct in India, R. Sridhar.
99

When we met I asked him how he got married to his wife

Vijay. Did arranged marriages still exist in India? Or was it a
love match?
He said that it was an arranged marriage and 70% of marriages
were still arranged.
Then he told this story.
Sridhar had written an article in "Business India" on Direct
Marketing - hoping to get some more business.
The next day an elderly, distinguished person arrived at his
door with his wife.
Sridhar noticed he carried a copy of "Business India" and was
most interested.
He invited the man in and said: "Can I help you?" And this
is how the conversation went.
"I have a daughter who is ready to get married. And last
week I placed a matrimonial ad in the papers. I am very
disappointed with the response."
It's very common in India to advertise for your bride. That's
precisely how Sridhar found his own wife.
The man continued: "Then I saw this article. You seem to
have done something for a restaurant, a blood bank and some computer. I wonder if you could raise responses for a matrimonial ad."
He then gave Sridhar a fifteen minute lecture on how difficult
it was to get girls married - and why as a last resort he had
thought of advertising.
Sridhar asked for a copy of the advertisement.
It said:
Wanted: Brahmin bridegroom, for a well accomplished South Indian girl under 23. Reply Box No.
Sridhar: "You said the response is poor."
"Of course it is bloody poor. I got three replies. One is from
a widower. One is from a Kashmiri Brahmin. The third is from
a boy who is just 23. Too young."
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"Look, my daughter is a MSc. first class. This chap should at

least have a good degree. Of course he must have a good job.
And he must be the right age. She is 23."
So they wrote the ad again: Wanted: a well educated, well
employed bridegroom around 27 for a 23 year old South Indian
Brahmin MSc. Reply ....
This was rejected by the man's wife because it didn't say
anything about horoscopes, which are considered important in
India.
Also it didn't clarify whether they were looking for an Iyer
or an Iyengar bridegroom - these are two types of Brahmin.
The girl was fairly slim and very fair. The more traditional
Indians are very concerned about whether people are fair or dark
(a common concern in many cultures, for those of you who are
politically correct.)
So they had to take account of this and also the fact that the
girl was a very good Carnatic Music Singer. Thus, the son-in-law
must appreciate music.
The girl was also an officer in the State bank with a good
salary. And she was the only daughter of a well to do industrialist.
On the other hand, she didn't mind settling abroad.
So they rewrote it again:
"Wanted: a well educated, well employed, Iyengar bridegroom
around 27, for a 23 year old, 5'6" very fair, slim, South Indian
Brahmin MSc. Bank Officer. Well accomplished Carnatic singer. Only
daughter of a successful industrialist. Girl willing to settle abroad.
Reply with horoscope..."
They showed the wife the draft again. By this time Sridhar
was hoping it would go through.
But she was a difficult client. She rejected it again. It didn't
say anything about lineage. So there had to be another qualification
- non-Bharadwaja - which means nothing to me, but meant a lot
to them. This is how the ad then read:

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"Wanted: a well educated, well employed non-Bharadwaja Iyengar

bridegroom around 27, for a 23 year old South India very fair, slim,
5'6" MSc Bank Officer. Well accomplished Carnatic singer. Only
daughter of a successful industrialist. Girl is willing to settle abroad.
Reply with horoscope...."
Then the lady turned the question of media placement.
"Where did you place your last ad?"
"Times of India in Bombay," said the husband.
"Quite wrong" said the lady. "You should have gone into the
Hindu. Even in Bombay, the type we are looking for will buy the
Hindu every Sunday only for the matrimonial ads. Make sure
you release it on a Sunday."
So the media schedule was settled. But what about the timing?
"We can get it in next Sunday", Sridhar said.
No, no", said the lady. "This is the month of ashada. Nobody
ever contemplates marriage this month. So you wouldn't get any
replies.
And another thing. Do you think you could get a Madras
Box Number? Because I think you will get better replies."
"How much would it cost?" asked her husband.
"About Rs. 390," said Sridhar
"My God. If I only got three replies, each reply would cost
me Rs. 130."
His wife said "So what? Why are you bothered about numbers?
If you get one worthwhile alliance, won't that be enough?"
A few weeks later the gentleman called Sridhar and said:
"You know that ad you did for us. We released it in the
Hindu two weeks ago and got nearly 40 replies. There are at
least seven worthwhile. Thanks a lot."
Sridhar confessed to having squirmed when he accepted this
compliment. He realised his clients had contributed most.
They'd taught him quite a lesson about targeting and creative.
I find this story interesting for three reasons.

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First, it demonstrates that no matter what country you are

in, your clients can often teach you a lesson. Second, it shows
that the more precise your copy is the better you will do - and
that usually means making it longer. And third, that the quality
of the reply often matters more than the cost.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Being precise can make the difference between failure and success.
Worry about right things: results not just costs.
It may take more than once to get your ad right.
Generally the more you tell, the more you sell.

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HELPFUL IDEA 28:

Beware cheap deals on fancy numbers
If you are not careful, you could lose your shirt on must-do deals.
Heres one of the richest man in the UK, publisher Felix Dennis,
on must-do deals:
Never fall in love with a deal. A deal is just a deal. There will
always be other deals and other opportunities. No deal is a
must-do deal. If it is, you are at the mercy of the party sitting
across the table and trust me they will know this perfectly
well. In that case, your goose is cooked and your future will
already be in their hands.
I GOT AN E-MAIL from somebody fairly illiterate reading:
End of the month, please give me a call...
Just a quick note to ask if your interested in doing a large email campaign
to UK Company Directors (Managing Director, Sales Directors and
Finance Directors)?
We have over 300,000 of these people on file, and if you'd like to talk
about doing a large scale campaign on a national basis then please
give me a call on 0845 373 3953 (Select option 5).
I have some very good end of month discounts at the moment for new
clients, but only for large scale nationwide email campaigns.
It's fairly illiterate because the eighth word in the first line
of copy should be "you're", not "your". And you know what? I
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think if people can't write English, what else are they bad at?
This e-mail reminded me of those occasions when I've ended
up with something I really shouldn't have bought - but I did.
You know how it is. You see something in a store that's such
a good deal you just can't resist it. You're worried that someone
else might get it before you, and the thing is, the store is closing
in 10 minutes, so you don't want to miss it.

Founder of this magazine says No deal is must-do deal.

You end up with something you never would have bought

if you'd thought a little. That may cost you a few quid, or dollars
- but when you do this in business, the damage could be much
greater.
For a start, what you save is less important than what you
might lose (or potentially make). Better to take a sample and mail
it at a higher price than blow your money on mailing the lot.
And, come to think of it, how many products or services do
you know that appeal to every company director in the country?
Not many, I'll bet.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Better to take a sample and mail it at a higher price than blow your
money on mailing the lot.
No deal is must-do deal.
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HELPFUL IDEA 29:

Do you have strippers behind counters?
Is your business exciting, fabulous and fantastic? Really?
Just because you say so doesnt make it so.
NOW BEFORE I GO ANY FURTHER, this "idea" hardly qualifies,
as it is just a mistake so damned obvious that I hope you don't make it.
There are only two reasons I have the nerve to put it forward.
The first is that I see it made every day by people who ought
to know better - like the world's biggest bank, for instance, slap
bang in the middle of Europe's most successful shopping street.
The second is that, although seemingly a small thing, it
damages something much larger and more important which I
shall come to in a moment.
Here is an example of what I mean, taken with my tacky
mobile phone.

There are many ways to describe banking,

but exciting probably isnt one of them

So, tell me, dear reader, do YOU find your bank exciting?
Do you see it as the ideal party venue? Will you be waiting nervously
106

outside the new branch just before it opens, wanting to be the

first to rush in and use one of the free pens? Or do you, like most
normal people, consider the opening of a new bank as interesting
as a wet afternoon in the local cemetery?
My point is that the idea of a new bank being exciting is
downright absurd. And that this word exciting - and a number
of others, like fabulous and fantastic - is used on an astounding
number of occasions by people who can't be bothered to think
of something more appropriate.
One reason is that very few writers nowadays have a rich
vocabulary, but it's too late to do much about that. What matters
is to understand what words like this do - or fail to do. It is true
that a little exaggeration is no bad thing in copy - but you can
only stretch the truth so far.
Free drinks and topless girls!
If your new bank does have something special about it free food or
strippers behind the counters, perhaps - say so. If it hasn't, shut up.
You may ask why this matters.
I know I have quoted Fairfax Cone elsewhere in this series,
but I make no excuse for doing so again.
When he saw bad copy he would ask the culprit: "Would
you say that to someone you know?" If you wouldn't, don't foist
it in the general public.
This is because by doing so abuse an essential element in
the relationship between you and your prospect or customer.
That element is called trust. And by coincidence, it is the lack
of this between banks which has had such a disastrous effect on
all of us in recent years. But that's another story.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Tell the truth.

Its easier to lose trust than get it.

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HELPFUL IDEA 30:

On fashion
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to
alter it every six months. Oscar Wilde
Dont be a dedicated follower of fashion.
MAYBE YOU'RE TOO OLD to remember it, but that was a big hit
for The Kinks, 42 years ago.
Fashion can be fatal. But marketers are among the most dedicated
followers of fashion you can imagine. The fashions they usually
follow fall into the silver bullet category.
By that I mean things people think will solve all their problems
overnight. One reason is that we are like sheep; where one goes,
another follows.
Another is that all human beings want to believe in miracles.
You only have to study slimming fads, or stock exchange folly to
realise that. But there are no miracles, and what goes up tends to
come down eventually in the case of investment; though in the
case of weight, the reverse usually applies.
The truth is that besides being gullible people are lazy. Marketing
is hard. So any ready-packaged solution is very appealing. That
is why a lot of organisations set up CRM divisions, usually before
either they or the people running them had
the faintest idea what it was.
Again, when the internet took off, a ton
of money was invested in some pretty unlikely
projects. Then came the dotcom boom and
bust, which I am quite proud to say I predicted
Be fearful when
in my book "Commonsense Direct Marketing" others are greedy and
- before I changed the title to "Commonsense greedy when others are
fearful.
Direct and Interactive Marketing"
108

As usual, the world's best and funniest investor, Warren Buffett

has an apt phrase. "We simply attempt to be fearful when others
are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful."
The latest fad to lose people a lot of money is social media. And to
give you an idea of how much less effective it is than people think, here's
a statistic for you relating to the 'causes' application on Facebook.
Over the last 12 months for which figures were available
when I drafted this just $2.5m had been obtained in the US by
19,445 charitable organizations through Causes. That's an average of just $126 per organization.
Imagine the time and effort that went into getting that $126.
The meetings. The discussions. The emails. The memos. The
thinking. The ideas. The presentations.
They would have done infinitely better using direct mail or
street interviews, but neither are fashionable.
Because nowadays special visual effects are so sophisticated
and cheap there is a fashion among motor manufacturers to run
amazingly expensive and elaborate TV spots showing cars doing
impossible things but say almost nothing coherent about the
cars or why anyone should buy them.
It really is hard work to arrive at a good reason for buying car
A rather than car B, so they hope special effects will do the trick.
No hope.
Three things are worth considering.
First, if everyone else is following a fashion, is it wise for you
to join in?
Second, isnt it wiser to be different rather than the same?
Third, why not determine what makes you different and better
and find the appropriate way, not the fashionable way, to tell people?

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

The worlds greatest investor knows trends can make

people do stupid things.
Follow the money not the herd.
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HELPFUL IDEA 31:

To limit yourself, is to limit your profits
Dont get trapped in one medium or form of marketing.
Do you only watch TV? Only read books? Only listen to the
radio? Of course not. What about your customers? Do they
only expose themselves to pixels and bits online?
IF YOU'VE READ THESE IDEAS you know that I wrote them
whenever something occurred to me that I thought would be helpful
to you.
Listen to this
Some time ago I was being interviewed on the phone (listen to it by
clicking here http://www.systemintensive.com/uk/drayton.mp3) by
Ken McCarthy - one of the internet marketing pioneers (he was
the first in the world to run a web marketing seminar - back in
1994 when I was just putting together my first website).
We got on to the way people who sell online seem to imagine
that the world revolves around that particular medium - and
nothing else. Madness.
As I said to him: this is like having an army in which you
only have artillery or infantry.
And this occurred to me with renewed force when I was
reading a very good piece from Mind-Valley labs about how to
get material published on what they call internet "Authority
Sites."
The advice was excellent. If that's your aim, it couldn't be
better. But let me ask you something.
Do you only watch TV? Only read books? Only listen to the
radio? Of course not. You have many sources of information.
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More to the point, do you only buy online, or decide on what to

buy online? Do you never visit shops? Never buy through the
mail? Of course not.
So, helpful idea for today: learn about and profit from everything. Every kind of marketing, every kind of business, every
medium.
Sounds like Im repeating myself? Good. It means you are
paying attention.
When you close your mind, you kill your profits. When you
open it, when you study everything - when you cease to be a
narrow specialist, you open the floodgates of profit.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

You wouldnt advertise movies only in cinemas, so dont

limit yourself only to forms and methods you know best.
The more marketing weapons you master, the better
youll do.

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HELPFUL IDEA 32:

Try some donkey (or schnauzer) business
There are no small parts in theatre, only small actors.
The same is true in advertising.
Dont bunt. Be more ambitious, said David Ogilvy. Here
are three examples what the desire for glory can do for your
results.
THE RATHER MISERABLE LOOKING GENT I am showing
you below worked about a minute's walk from my London office.
He had one of the most boring jobs you can imagine, but
managed to make it a bit more interesting by playing the fool.
He is a Mexican, and stood for a few hours dressed as a burro,
or donkey, at the entrance of a small court with five or six sandwich
shops and restaurants and a pub in it.
One always had the longest queues.
It was the Mexican takeaway, selling
(you guessed it) burritos.
And the reason was my friend, who
stood there shaking his head when people
came near, handing out menus and when
he felt inspired making donkey noises.
He was impossible to ignore. Across the
road is another Mexican joint, which is
pretty much always empty. Why? No
This donkey is the
donkey.
difference
between success
Relevant surprise always works, and
and
failure
for one
donkeys seem to be all the mode at the
Mexican takeaway.
moment. For at least forty years
Smirnoff have been trying to popularise a drink called the
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Moscow Mule, the ingredients of which change according to

some arbitrary rule unknown to me.
However, the drink hasn't really done all that well compared
with, say, a Bloody Mary, mainly because the advertising has
been bloody awful. But they eventually came up with an excellent
campaign. Here is one example.

Could this campaign make Moscow Mule as famous as Bloody Mary?

It is not the girl with the sexy high heels who will do the
trick - though I'm sure the art director had a lot of fun choosing
the models; it is the donkey pretending to be a mule. There was a
whole series of girls with this delightful animal, and I think it did
a great job - assuming the drink tasted OK.
This campaign did not run very long. Probably not long
enough to do a decent job. As wiser people than I have often
commented, advertisers often get tired of their advertising long
before the public.
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Another campaign which used pictures well is below, which

I liked because I used to have schnauzers. Unlike the utterly
pointless and obscenely expensive technical wizardry used on a
lot of car commercials this is relevant. If ever I have worms, I
know where to go.

The best ideas are usually simple.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Dare to be different.
A relevant surprise in advertising rarely fails.
There are no dull products or services, only dull
copywriters.
A big idea doesnt have to be expensive.

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HELPFUL IDEA 33:

Every time we get creative we lose money.
Fight to rein in your brilliant creative flair.
The quote in the title is from American executive who learned
an old mail order lesson the hard way. Straightforward
approach usually beats clever.
THIS IS A CRIMINAL PICTURE. It is criminal because it is a
criminal waste of money - which is a disgrace, as the advertiser,
Centrepoint, is a charity that helps young people who are out on
the streets.

An advert that failed.

So money that should be going to help them is being squandered to satisfy some little genius's idea of a clever line. It will
almost certainly do no good, and quite possibly a fair bit of
harm.
What has happened is that some idiot has decided to be
clever and play on the fact that a lot of people see black faces as
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threatening - so as to point out that they're not at all - they are

loveable little muppets.
But all that happens with something like this is that people
see the heading and agree. If they bother to go on, they just say,
"So what" if they agree with the argument or, Rubbish" if they
don't.
Charities and their agencies are particularly prone to making
this mistake; I have no idea why. But you simply cannot rely on
people appreciating your wit or irony - they are all too likely to
take you literally.
A lesson I still havent learnt
When I ran a large creative department, people would often
come up with this sort of creative tripe and try to sell it to me.
I would say something of a helpful but mildly critical nature like "This is total bollocks" and the writer and art director would
say, "But let us explain".
Then I would end the discussion by observing that owing to
a number of financial and logistical problems we couldn't send
them round to every single prospect so as to explain the brilliance
of their ideas.
Almost invariably, too, I have found that if I think one of my
own ideas is brilliant it flops miserably. Serves me right for not
learning my lesson. Incidentally, if you want to know what makes
people give to or support charity, the answer is powerful emotion.
The key is explained by a famous President of Brazil, Sr.
Lula Da Silva, who said, "Pockets are the most sensitive part of
a human being; therefore we must touch hearts and minds first."

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

The advertisers job is to sell not to entertain

or publish puzzles.
Do what a salesman would do and you wont go far off.
You dont have to be clever to sell. In fact, usually the
opposite works better.
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HELPFUL IDEA 34:

Understand direct brand-building
Building your brand with direct marketing could be more
powerful (and cheaper) than conventional image advertising.
There are many, many superb examples of image advertising:
Coke, Nike, Apple and Marlboro, for example. But there are
quite a few well known firms who took the road less traveled:
direct marketing. And succeeded with much tinier war
chests.
REGULARLY PEOPLE ASK ME to do talks answering the
question: can you build a brand with direct marketing?
This always astonishes me, because plenty of brands - The
Readers Digest, MBNA, Direct Line and Churchill Insurance,
for example - have been built without
any image advertising, but it clearly
interests a lot of people.
One of the best pieces on this subject
was written years ago by Bill Fryer, who
has the misfortune to run an agency of
which I am the inadequate chairman.
Since then his article has been plagiarised
extensively because it is so good.
A whole industry has
You will find links to it scattered
grown up around the
through the Internet. This is the original
need to promote and
text preserved forever amongst the electrons build brands, but Bill
of the Internet.
Fryer argues that brand
And Bill says, "Thanks to all those image is no substitute
for brand reality.
plagiarists - it's a great compliment."
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WHY DIRECT MARKETING IS

A BETTER BRAND BUILDING TOOL THAN CONVENTIONAL
BRAND IMAGE ADVERTISING

by Bill Fryer MA Oxon - bill@billfryer.com

No one can dispute the power of a brand; the effect is very
plain in direct marketing. Almost without exception a mailing
by a big brand will significantly outpull one by a lesser known
or unknown brand. Brands give you and me something to trust,
reassurance of quality and increasingly, status.
What is frequently debated is how to make one with the
power to increase sales. I won't make any friends for saying it but
there are any number of people who will tell you that what you
need to do is spend 5,000,000 a year on prime time TV
advertising for about 20 years - not a prospect I would relish.
People have difficulty understanding how to create powerful
brands because it is very difficult to work out the personality of
something completely intangible. In my opinion the best way to
look at brands is to think of them as people. Allow me to explain...
If you were getting to know me you might read something
about me, you might talk to some of my friends, you might pick
up some juicy gossip about me or you might have seen some of
my work. With all this information from all these different
sources you form an opinion about me. If all of this information
consistently says "Bill Fryer is a great guy" you might approach
me and strike up a conversation or start working with me on
some project.
When you start talking to me and being with me however
you start to discover the reality of me - a great guy but, bad
breath, arrogant and at times highly obnoxious. (Actually I'm really
not that bad I just said it like that for effect). The point is that
when you actually interact with me you get the information you
need to form your own opinions about me, and that is much
more powerful than the reported information you based your
initial conclusions on.
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Brands are the same. You can spend all the money you like
buying chunks of airtime in which to compose messages saying
how great you are, paying celebrities and beautiful people to
espouse your charms, and using PR to manipulate the media to
say great things about you. But if the time comes when the
customer tries your product and finds it sucks or rings up to
complain and gets a "nothing to do with us" attitude or gets a
series of overly heavy correspondence about some trivial matter
- then they start to get a real picture of your brand; the brand
reality.
The converse is also true. If your advertising and PR isn't
particularly hot but 'wow' are you nice, pleasant people to deal
with and 'hey' does your product work well, that kind of brand
message gets passed around. True it takes a little more time if
you don't advertise it but it is most certainly the approach that
works best in the long term.
Now direct marketing by definition involves a company
interacting with its customers. And that is why I say that
direct marketing is a far more powerful brand building tool than
conventional broad brush approaches. Evidence for this is plain
to see: Reader's Digest, American Express and Tango are all
examples of powerful brands built on direct marketing. Recently
Viking office supplies was sold for over 1 billion. We've all seen
their catalogues - not the most attractive in the world, but have
you ever dealt with them? They really deliver. And the power of
their brand is reflected in the sale price of the company.
Also I have to say that for many products, especially those
that are low cost everyday items, like most foods for example,
this broadcast approach is often enough - but not always.
That is why Tango is such an interesting example. As a soft
drink brand you might have thought they don't need to interact
with their customers - my point above - and the product is too
cheap to merit conventional direct marketing methods. But they
were languishing on the sidelines until their famous orange man
campaign. Some of their campaigns have generated over
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100,000 responses. The point here is that by choosing to follow

a strategy of interacting with their customers they have
successfully differentiated themselves from the competition with
prodigious results. Why aren't their competitors doing anything
similar?
In my ever so humble, albeit at times outspoken, opinion
any marketer's focus should always be primarily on how they
can improve the reality of their brand and then how they can
communicate that to the widest possible audience.
Then there is the vexed question of brand equity. I am often
horrified to read of companies that make a financial calculation
of their brand worth - which then appears on the balance sheet
- based on how much they have spent on advertising. Mainly
because I know of several companies that have launched multimillion pound advertising campaigns only to see sales drop as a
result. Dr Andrew Ehrenberg states that the value of your brand
is how many customers you have. What else could it logically
be?
The value of your brand is defined as the added value in sales
generated by the brand's goodwill compared to a baseline of an
unknown brand. If an unknown brand has zero customers and
your well-known brand has 100,000 good customers then that
surely is the basis for working out the value of your brand on
the balance sheet. But without a corporate database of customers
how can you tell how many you have or who they are? And how
can you communicate directly with them when you need to?
Using the human analogy again if I have 100 good friends
in my address book and you have 50 in yours is not my brand
twice the value of yours?
I'm not knocking the power of conventional brand image
advertising, I fully acknowledge the power of campaigns like
Marlboro, BMW and those for Apple Macintosh. I just believe
that if you want to create a really valuable brand, focus on the
reality first and the image second. And direct marketing is all
about brand reality.
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Bill Fryer is Creative Director of Bill Fryer Direct, a direct

marketing agency in Warminster, Wiltshire. Why don't you talk to Bill
Fryer Direct about how you can work together to increase your sales and
boost the value of your brand. Send mail to bill@billfryer.com or visit
www.billfryer.com

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

The value of your brand is determined by how many

customers you have.
TV is not the only way to build brands.
Worry about your brands reality first, image second.

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HELPFUL IDEA 35:

How questionnaires could increase your sales
People love to give their opinions.
You will love the profit you get from asking them.
A questionnaire is a powerful marketing weapon far too
little used. Your customers like to give their opinions. And
you usually get more sales simply because you show that you
care not the mention the knowledge that helps you do even
better in the future.
A FRIEND IN AUSTRALIA, Gail Brennan, recently sent me a
question about questionnaire responses. Nobody knows more
about this than my old colleague Andrew Boddington, who is
one of the best direct marketers I know, so after giving my opinion, I referred her to him.
Then it suddenly occurred to me that this is a subject well
worth talking about, and nobody knows more about it than
Andrew. I have worked with him for many years now off and
on. His speciality, I guess, is database. But his knowledge of
marketing is much wider - and he makes everything seem so
simple.
So, after one or two comments from me, he has kindly written
a quick guide to what you should know about the subject.
Why questionnaires?
Some techniques - and questionnaires are a good example - are
so deceptively simple and obvious that people ignore them.
They're not "creative" enough. Well, screw "creative". I like
things that work. And questionnaires work.
People love to give you their opinions. The questionnaire is
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a very unthreatening way to approach people. You just have to

ask nicely and often amazingly high percentages will reply.
When they do reply, this gives you an excuse to talk to them
again.
So here is Andrew's advice for you:
How to get people to answer your questionnaires and buy
1. People agonise over making the survey short for maximum
response, but do not fear a long survey. As long as the questions
seem 'natural and logical' to the reader, they will complete it,
once the first few questions have been answered.
2. If you have some questions which are more critical than
others, make sure the survey has clear sections - the first with the
main questions, then the next introduced with the words "You
do not have to answer these, but if you do so, it'll mean x, y and
z benefit...and will only take a few minutes more..."
3. Response can be increased by a variety of details. A lot
depends on the honesty in the introduction, why you are doing
the survey, what is in it for the responder (altruism, sense of helping
self or fellows, and maybe even the chance to win something in a
free draw, as a gesture of thanks), explaining how the results will
be used, and even how they can see a copy of the results (usually
a simple summary).
4. People love being asked for their opinion ('your opinion
matters to us'), so use flattery to increase participation.
5. Make the introduction from someone they already might
know and respect, rather than have no name at all. Even have it
look like a letter, with a signature and photo for a touch of
warmth.

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6. Much depends on the layout, the clarity of type face and

typography, and the use of colours, tints and boxed sections
make it look less daunting.
7. It sounds radical, but question how much response is
really needed. Statistically a lower response sample may be fine,
so that the views are representative.
8. Try a reminder mailing/emailing after the natural
response has dried up from the first survey. Non-responders are
not against responding, they just have busy lives, are lazy, like
all human beings, so a courteous reminder will typically get half
as much response again.
9. Consider how/when the survey gets handed over, emailed
or mailed. Is there a better moment, so they'll more disposed to
take part?

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

People like to give their opinions.

Dont just ask for feedback, use it to improve.
You can use long surveys too, just make it easy to reply.

124

HELPFUL IDEA 36:

Where to find your missing profits (again)
Regain your lost millions.
I wonder where more money is wasted: on advertising that
doesnt sell, or on lack of following up sales leads? This piece
is about the latter.
I MUST APOLOGISE for what follows, because I said something
very similar earlier. However, I was prompted to repeat it with
variations because of something that happened one morning.
I was writing to a client who has three unique products products so good that, amongst others, the military, the banks,
the railways and telecoms are interested in them - not to mention
some of the worlds most famous brands.
Other people can see that they are great products, too, because
he has had no trouble raising a lot of money. Yet he is not yet
making a profit, which must frustrate him - and plain maddens
me - because I know precisely what he has to do. So this is what
I wrote - and if it rings any bells with you, I'm glad!
"You have an almost unnatural ability to come up
with winning products - I was actually telling
someone about it the other day.
But you're only half way - from what you told me
- to making a profit on them.
Without even looking I wager I can tell you where
the missing profits are.
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They are in unsold leads. Millions of pounds worth

of profits.
I recall that the very first thing I ever wrote for
you was a follow-up to people who had enquired
but not bought.
I will lay a lot of money that it is not being used
systematically - and probably not at all. The reason
is that your sales manager is in charge of this. For
in nearly 50 years in this business I have ALWAYS
found that:
1. If a sale is not made the average salesman (or
sales manager) thinks it will never be made
because the prospect is:
a. Not interested or
b. Stupid or
c. Has no money or
d. Not the real decision-maker
e. Not the right kind of company
f. Not a genuine prospect
2. Whereas in fact:
a. They did not like the salesman.
b. The sales pitch was no good

126

c. They had something else they needed to buy

d. "Something came up"
e. They moved to another job
f. They couldn't persuade the money people
I guarantee that you have all the sales you need
lying around in unsold leads but not followed up
... and I bet your sales manager doesn't believe it.
This is your friend speaking!
I have told people countless times that the biggest unreaped
harvest in business lies in leads people have given up on.
I once asked one of the cleverest and most successful marketers
I know worth millions when not much more than 30 how
long he follows up leads.
His reply was simple.
Till they give in.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Keep communicating until it doesnt pay.

I have yet to see a company that follows up too many times.
Before your next customer acquisition campaign,
look into your backyard first. You may find hidden gold
under your feet.

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HELPFUL IDEA 37:

How NOT to choose an agency
The way some people to choose ad agencies is
more destructive than you may think.
Ive seen this happen more than I care to remember. Agencies
picked based on their ability to entertain, amuse and bribe.
Sheer, witless and fearfully expensive folly
AGAIN I MUST APOLOGISE for pointing out something childishly obvious... but it is clearly necessary, as almost every major
marketer makes this exceptionally stupid mistake.
As a matter of fact, a large and lucrative industry has grown
up to cater for the idiots who make it. It is called by those of us
who have suffered from it, a "beauty parade". Or, more formally,
The Pitch for the Account.
Here's how it goes, all too often.
1. A large firm gets a new marketing director.
2. Among the many things he or she does - like changing everything
his predecessor did, good or bad - is to change the agency, good
or bad.
3. The objective is often, but not always, to get old friends in.
4. A statement is issued to the Trade Press - which is a sort of
extended gossip column interspersed with news of little importance,
fawning articles about industry "figures" and jargon-crammed
pieces written by suppliers in the hope of flogging stuff.
5. Since the only thing of real interest is what might make
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money, the announcement is read eagerly and the firm is bombarded

with requests from agencies to be considered.
6. An outside firm is hired at considerable expense to suggest
which agencies should be allowed to present for the account
because the client is too idle, ill-informed or both to do this
simple task.
7. They, quite impartially, of course, suggest (far too many) firms
who have paid them to be put on such lists and who seem on the
face of it to be qualified.
8. Vast sums of money, far too much time, and altogether too
many meetings are devoted to the agencies putting together
proposals and the clients reviewing them.
9. A "short list" is created.
10 More meetings take place, much speculative creative work
is produced, and then there a series of presentations, with more
meetings to talk about them.
11. The marketing director and his colleagues none of whom
have the faintest idea what might work and most of whom know
nothing sbout marketing - decide who will get the account.
12. Sometimes the creative work is put into research, which
usually gives absolutely no indication of what will really work
(and often is 180 degrees wrong, I assure you).
13. The account is assigned. Very often it ends up with people
the Marketing Director had worked with before, rather as
retired generals wind up working for weapons firms.
14. The client is taken to some excellent, if overpriced restaurants
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where much mutual back-slapping ensues.

15. Since when pitching for the business the agency knew even
less about it than the client, the work that won the account is
cast aside and they are now asked to produce more work which
reflects something closer to what is needed.
So now you know some very good reasons why so much
marketing fails.
Could this bring you better results?
If you actually want it to work, just find out the agencies (or
people) who appear best qualified, based on proper research by
you - if you are the person responsible.
Then ask the two or three agencies who seem to have the
best record of getting measurable results and can explain how
they got them, to create work you can test.
Once you appoint someone, keep testing their work against
that done by others, without making them feel threatened assuming they are doing a good job. (And before you switch
again, remember that teaching new people takes time and costs
money.)
Any fool should know all this, but clearly many otherwise
smart people don't.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Dont make choosing an agency more complicated than it is:

pick a few candidates that have shown to their ability to
produce results and test them.
Understand that every lunch, gift and trip is eventually paid
for by the client.

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HELPFUL IDEA 38:

Go small. It could pay off big
A large advert may please your ego not your bottom line.
Im not making any friends among art directors and media
salesmen by saying this, but: beware big adverts. The white
space that tells nothing, sells nothing.
HERE IS SOMETHING EXCITING for you. A chart. I don't
like them - schoolday memories! But this one is worth a lot of
money.

The chart based on research by Philip Sainsbury shows that smaller

media spaces are pro rata far more cost-effective.

The chart is based on research by Philip Sainsbury, whom I

worked with some thirty years ago. He had examined all the
studies done on the effect of space size on response. It seems
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advertisers and academics had been looking at this ever since

the early 1900's.
Now you might expect a full page to do twice as well as a
half page, and a double page spread twice as well as a full page.
Not so. As the chart shows (and it seems all the studies came to
almost identical conclusions) smaller spaces are pro rata FAR
more cost-effective. A quarter page gets almost half as many
replies as a full page. A double page is not even 50% more
effective than a page.
But
This assumes that the copy is identical in all cases, of course.
It ignores the fact that you can often get a better rate for a full
page. And the fact that you can get more copy in a bigger space.
Having said all that, never take a bigger space than you
need; and don't imagine that a lot of elegant white space will sell
for you. If it says nothing, it sells nothing.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

A quarter page may get almost half as many replies as

a full page.
A double page is not even 50% more effective than a page.
Never take a bigger space than you really need.

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HELPFUL IDEA 39:

Lessons from selling expensive complex
products and services like air planes, real estate,
seminars and legal advice
Dont let high price dismay you. Its just salesmanship.
Theres common belief that you need something very
expensive if you want to make money from small numbers.
I have found its not always true. Anyhow, here are some lessons
I learned from selling very expensive products and services.
THIS DEALS WITH ONE of the most common mistakes people
make. Recently I got a message from Peter Sharples, who wanted
my advice on selling high-ticket items.
Well, years ago I wrote the ads for a very high ticket item
indeed. It was called the Airbus. How much did I vary my
approach? Less than you might think. I started with five
thoughts.
Five tips on selling big ticket items
1. I had to explain how it was different and better. So I explained
how the two engines (rather than three or four) made it more
economical.
2. I had to overcome objections. So I explained how these engines
were just as safe - you could land with just one functioning.
3. I had to remember that people would be buying it. So I went
about appealing to human emotions.
4. I had to remember that there would be many decision-makers.
So I bore that in mind in my copy.
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5. I had to remember it was expensive and decisions take a long

time. You don't get up one morning and say. I think I'll buy an
Airbus. So I didn't say "buy now while stocks last".
So, yes, high ticket items are indeed different. But it is still
all about buying and selling. You must use common sense and
adapt what you do to how people buy - the process. Besides the
fact that you often have several decision makers, and that they
all have different motivations which you must address with differing messages, there is one very significant difference.
The greater the price, the harder it normally is to get a sale.
A low price usually means a one-step or maybe a two step sale,
without a great deal of reflection. Who broods over spending
5? But a 1,000 sale - that may be different. And a 50,000
sale, even more so.
In those higher realms, there may be many stages. You run
an ad, or send an e-mail or some direct mail. You get a reply. Or
maybe they go to your website. You try to capture their names.
You may phone them. You may have a salesman go and visit.
You may invite them to a seminar. Then, it may take you
months or even years to get the sale closed. Here are some things
to bear in mind:
Long copy or short?
Good, long copy almost invariably beats short copy, anyhow. But
this is particularly true when things cost a lot.
Let me give you a couple of examples: one of our clients sold
a product that starts at 85,000. The average spend though, was
170,000.
Their sales process began with a one page letter. So we
rewrote it. When we had finished, it was four pages long.
Here's the rub though: they said they wouldn't send it out
as 'nobody will read a four page letter'. But we persevered, and
they reluctantly agreed to send it.
The result? Response tripled and sales doubled. You see,
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when you are asking people to spend substantial amounts, their

neck is on the line - they'd read a book on the subject if they
could find one.
More recently we sent out a 6 page letter to sell a very complex
on-line product to lawyers. It went to under 2,000 people. One
firm splashed out over l00,000 just on the strength of that letter,
another over 50,000.
The mailing with one follow-up and a whole sales sequence
produced over 1,000,000 in sales. In fact we then created another series for that client which produced over 1,500,000 in
sales.
At that point they got a new marketing director and I never
heard from them again. Don't get me started on that subject.
Remember, though, there's a huge difference between being
long-winded and being relevant. In fact I think my first letter
to lawyers was a bit flabby, and have cut it back.
How to use multiple sales arguments
Expensive products seldom if ever have one benefit - usually
you'll end up with quite a list when writing your drafts. Here's
what you should do.
1. Write a letter or e-mail/landing page that encompasses all the
points. If you miss any one out, you are missing a potential sale
from readers who might be motivated by it.
2. Make sure you also overcome all reasonable objections. Again,
any one omitted can lose you a sale.
3. Break the individual topics down into a logical sequence, then
use them as the openings to a series of helpful messages to
prospects. These can be letters, White Papers - whatever.
Doing this serves two important purposes:

Firstly, different prospects have different needs - and until

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you are further down the sales process you won't know what
they are. So you have to cover every angle.

Secondly, you stay on their radar without sending out

mindless propaganda. And prospects tend to hang on to
useful, helpful information.

Another good reason for doing this is it's very hard to stay
in touch with prospects when you have nothing new to say and
keep repeating yourself. Mind you, continually sending out the
same message to existing prospects is better than doing nothing
at all.
Continually qualify your prospect
Every so often politely ask your prospect whether they'd prefer if
they didn't hear from you again. This not only saves time and
money weeding out duff prospects. Another real advantage is
forcing your other prospects to ask, "Are we interested in what
you have to say and offer?"
Naturally, when you do this, you get more people than normal
asking not to hear from you again. But in the same light also you
get more than usual letting you know their intentions and where
they are in the buying process.
I suspect when you read the bit about long copy you muttered
to yourself "Easier said than done." It's true. So one good trick
is to write next to each paragraph a phrase summing up what it
says. Then you can see whether the sequence of argument makes
sense.
Lastly, here's a point you'll know I'm very fond of:

Don't ignore old prospects - always true but ESPECIALLY

true with expensive items. As I said to start with, the decision
may take a long time - sometimes years.
Putting the fury and energy most people apply to finding
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new prospects into existing prospects is always smart. Yet so

many still do not do it. And often old enquiries are your best
prospects, as you will have read early on in this series. For one
thing, you have been educating them about your merits!

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

It may take you months or even years to close an expensive

deal.
Good, long copy almost invariably beats short copy. But this
is particularly true when things cost a lot.
Often old enquiries are your best prospects. Try again
with them.
Make people choose. Ask Are you interested or not?

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HELPFUL IDEA 40:

Writing that works
Make your writing not your readers do the work.
Writing well is hard. Over 200 years ago Dr. Samuel Johnson
observed: "That which is written to please the writer rarely
pleases the reader." If you want to get ahead in business, try
improving your writing.
DO YOU HAVE TOO MUCH to read? Memos, reports, letters,
e-mails, leaflets, newspapers, magazines, catalogues, direct mail?
And are they breeding like wire coat hangers?
Well, in a survey some years ago, US business leaders were
asked what change they would most like to see in business. They
didn't talk about accounting or strategy. The majority pleaded:
"Teach people to write better." They just had too much written
garbage to plough through. We all do. If you read most stuff
put out nowadays it is appalling. Badly written, dull - and often
downright incomprehensible.
Yet to write better you just need to be able to count. This
was discovered by Rudolph Flesch, an American, who spent
years in the 1940's researching what makes for easy reading. As
a result he formulated some very easy rules.
What makes easy reading
The simplest is, make your sentences short. The easiest
sentence to take in is only eight words long. A sensible average
is 16 words. Any sentence of more than 32 words is hard to take
in. That's because most people tend to forget what happened at
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the beginning of the sentence by the time they get to the end.
You must make it easy for people.
The same applies to paragraphs. Vary them, but keep them
short, containing only one or two thoughts - especially the first
one. A long opening paragraph is daunting. And happily Microsoft Word has a tool partly based on Flesch which will help
you. Just go to Tools/Option/Spelling & Grammar/Show readability statistics. If you use that option it automatically tells you
how readable your stuff is. Oh - and whatever you do, ignore
their grammar suggestions - they're 100% useless.
Good examples
Read any popular novel, newspaper or magazine. They are written
for people who are not clever, or not concentrating. Words,
sentences and paragraphs are very short. And here are some other
suggestions.
1. A heading must make the reader want to find out more, and
not reveal so much they might not feel they need to read it.
2. Try to avoid 'we' instead of 'I' - the writing most likely to be
read is me to you. People don't relate to organisations.
3. Count the number of "you" words - yours and your - versus
"me" words - I, us, our, ours and we. The ratio should be at least
2:1, preferably 3:1.
4. Use "carrier" words and phrases at the beginnings of sentences
to keep people reading. Such as Moreover, That is why, In addition,
What's more, On top of that, Also and And. These tell your
reader there is more to come. And forget what your teacher told
you: "And" is often used to start sentences in The Bible.
5. You can also use questions at the ends of sentences or
paragraphs. Why is this?
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6. Because which you have to read on to get the answers (and if

you notice, the end of point 5 and start of this point demonstrate
what I mean).
George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" were gripping
parables about the nightmare of totalitarianism. In an essay he
gave six rules for better writing.
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech
which you are used to seeing in print.
People get used to them and they fail to take them in. Say something fresh or different. Don't say "at the end of the day" - say
"in the end"; don't say "put it to the acid test" - say "test thoroughly". "Cutting edge" or "state of the art" mean "newest"
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Complimentary - Free
Anticipate - Expect
Expectation - Hope
Authored - Wrote
Transportation - Car
Purchase - Buy
Ameliorate - Improve
Lifestyle - Life
Marketplace - Market
Transitioning - changing
3. If you can cut a word out, always do so.

"Miss out on" should be "miss"

"Male personnel" is "men"
"For free" is "free"
"Crisis situation" is "crisis"
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"Meal solution" is "meal" or "recipe"

"Research process" is usually "research"
"Station stop" is "station" or "stop"

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Active is always shorter. A biblical example is "Abel was slain by
Cain" - better as "Cain slew Abel".
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon
word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

"Interface" works better as "talk with"

"Core competencies" means "what we do best"
"Easy to use" beats "user-friendly"
"Mission statement" is "our aim"
"This is a non-smoking environment" is "No smoking"

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything

outright barbarous.
I have two suggestions besides making sure you write as
simply as possible.
Before you start, write a simple, logical structure for what
you want to say. Then draft - and revise until you're 100% sure
anyone can understand it.
A friend once gave me a recipe for this which delighted me.
"Show it to an idiot," he instructed, "Get them to read it, and ask
if they understand".
I don't show my writing to an idiot. I show it to someone
with common sense, but not as interested in the subject as I am.
This is often my PA., but could be anyone who happens to be
around.
I always say, "Can you read this, please? What do you think?
Is it clear?"
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Just remember you're not writing for yourself but for

others. Make it easy for them.
And if you want to make it easy for yourself get an excellent
and mercifully short book written by two of my former
colleagues called Writing that Works - How to Improve Your
Memos, Letters, Reports, Speeches, Resumes, Plans, and Other
Business Papers By Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Show it to someone who knows nothing about the subject.

See if they understand what you wrote.
Use short simple words.
Good writing is clear, not clever.

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HELPFUL IDEA 41:

Go for the kill!
A simple business lesson from the Great Depression
Your compelling headline is wasted if you don't go all out for a sale.
Headlines are important but dont forget your close. Little
things like commanding in selling can make big difference in
your profits. So dont delay read this now for bigger results!
I HAVE A DAUGHTER in Montclair, New Jersey - hometown
of the famous baseball coach Yogi Berra. As a result, I have made
a bit of a study of his remarks. And one of my favorites is, "You
can observe a lot just by looking."
One thing I have observed a lot is the disinclination of most
marketers to look at the past - and see what they can learn from
it. They just don't study enough. Coincidentally, a client recently
asked if I had any good examples of marketing during shaky
economic times. I was stumped for a moment, because wise
marketers do the same things in any economy:
What professional marketers do
They avoid trying to be "creative" like the plague; don't settle for
the first idea they come up with; test everything - and, for God's
sake, do everything they possibly can to get that response.
That last point is so important. And so often ignored. When
I look at marketing copy - which I do every day - I am struck by
how weak the calls to action are, especially when I consider how
much difference even tiny changes can make. For instance:

When I worked briefly with the astonishing Gene

Schwartz, I learned that writing "tear out this
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coupon" instead of "cut out this coupon" made a

significant difference in response rates.

When I got into catalogue marketing, I discovered

that if you put ordering details on every page, sales
went up.

When I wrote my first insurance mailings, tests

showed that doubling the size of the order form
boosted sales 25%.

And one of the first things I learned about TV

direct response was that the longer the phone
number is on the screen, the higher the response.

I just looked in my files and found the following - the end

of a leaflet. It dates back to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Calls to action do not come much stronger than this, do they?

Now that final paragraph really is a call to action. You can

tell that whoever wrote it really wanted people to reply:
"Let nothing, absolutely nothing, interfere with immediate
action," he wrote. "A change for the better justifies no delay.
Don't watch others make money which you can make. Be up
and doing now. Some other time may be too late. Place your
order and application this very minute. Take the action now that
means more money next week, independence next year."
The business promoted by that leaflet was successful for
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many years. And if you read the copy, you can see that it is in a
field that's very popular now on the Internet - making money by
selling stuff.
Just salesmanship
It is easy to forget that your advertising merely acts as a substitute
for a live salesperson. If you could afford it, you would send the
finest salesperson you have to do the job for you. So when you
look at your marketing copy, you must constantly ask yourself,
"Is this how a great salesperson would do it?"
If you want to make a sale, you must:

Remind people what they get when you ask for the
order.
Put a value on what they get. ("You could pay more
for a lunch for two.")
Remind them what they will miss if they don't
respond to your offer.
Emphasize the deadline or the limited numbers.
(I've seen that boost response by 50%.)

Here are some of the ways I like to end my sales copy:

"Why not make this the very next thing you do?"
"Why not reply the minute you finish
reading this?"
"It's so easy to put things off, isn't it?
Why not reply now?"
"Why not order now, while this is fresh
in your mind?"

I always try to ask for the sale at least three times at the end.
And if I'm working with long copy, I ask early on too. (That
gets people who are keen to buy right away.) And then I keep
asking at intervals.
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Give every reason to act

Now, here is an instructive little exercise for you. Read through
the last paragraph of copy in the leaflet example I gave above.
Here it is again:
"Let nothing, absolutely nothing, interfere with immediate
action. A change for the better justifies no delay. Don't watch
others make money which you can make. Be up and doing now.
Some other time may be too late. Place your order and application
this very minute. Take the action now that means more money
next week, independence next year."
Now count the number of reasons it gives for acting. I got
eight. Did you? That gives you some idea how hard you have to
fight for business in tough times. (Remember, that leaflet was
written during the Great Depression.)
The moment of truth comes when you ask for the order.
Believe me, few things cost less or make more difference than
doing that as though your life depends on it - because it may.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Give every reason to act now. Go for the kill!

Repeat your calls to action. Dont bury them at the end.
Unlike many think, closing getting the sale is the hardest
part in selling.

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HELPFUL IDEA 42:

Is discounting fatal?
The mistake that almost killed some of the world's biggest brands
I do give deals but discounting can hurt you if you are not
cautious. As one of the original 1960s mad men Howard Luck
Gossage said when he was diagnosed with leukemia, Its fatal
but not serious.
LIFE IS STRANGE. I am one of the most disorganized jokers
you'll ever meet, but a book by one of the world's most organized
people influenced me hugely. It was My Years With General
Motors by Alfred P. Sloan.
Under Sloan's leadership, General Motors became the
world's largest car manufacturer. The company was so important
to the US economy that they used to say, "What's good for General
Motors is good for the country." But General Motors - and
Chrysler - got into terrible trouble and had to be bailed out,
barely surviving.
How the mighty fall
There were many reasons, but one was their marketing. Aside
from their ads tending to be boastful and dull, they fell into a
habit I see as the marketing equivalent of crack addiction: heavy
discounting. This gives an immediate boost to sales, but you become addicted to it. And you get nasty after-effects - as with
crack. Consider:

The people who buy most from a promotion are

your best customers, who would have bought even
without the discount.
147

When offered a discount, people are enticed to

accelerate their buying decisions... so there is
a slump afterward.
You are training your customers to expect bribes.

To explain more about why this is so dangerous, I must take

you back 25 years.
The common mistake that kills firms
Ogilvy and Mather had a unit called the Ogilvy Centre for Research
in San Francisco. The director, Alex Biehl, was working on a
project called PIMS. PIMS stood - I think - for Profit Impact of
Marketing Strategies. Over 200 firms took part, and the project
was run in partnership with Professor Andrew Ehrenberg at the
London Business School. (David Ogilvy always said Andrew
had the best mind in marketing.)
One thing the project revealed was very simple, very
important - yet seemed to be news to almost all marketers:
Firms that spend more money on discounting than advertising
are far less profitable than those that spend more on advertising
than discounting.

The project divided the firms into four quartiles.

Those in the top quartile spent the most on
advertising and the least on discounting. Those in
the bottom quartile did it the other way round.

The firms in the top quartile were on average

twice as profitable as those in the bottom one.

Think about it. When you spend more on offering deals

than explaining why people should want to buy your stuff, you
are perilously close to saying, "Our stuff is not good enough to
sell on its merits at full price."
To get back to where I started... General Motors is no longer
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the world's biggest automotive firm. Toyota is. Another brand

that once led its market but no longer does is Dell. And guess
what? Every single e-mail Dell sends me offers a deal.
I am not saying never discount. I offer discounts all the time.
Nor am I saying traditional advertising is the answer to your
problems. What I am saying is that marketing messages through whatever medium - that give people reasons, emotional
or rational, for buying are the key to building your business and
brand.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Are you training your customers to expect bribes?

Your best customers often buy without promotions.
Firms that spend more money on discounting than
advertising are far less profitable than those that spend more
on advertising than discounting.
When offered a discount, people are enticed to accelerate
their buying decisions... so there is a slump afterward.

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HELPFUL IDEA 43:

Upside-down marketing
Why is upside-down marketing so popular?
And is it killing your business?
As far as I can see most sensible marketers are keen on
improving their creative. And why not? Simply by changing
what you say or how you say it you can double, triple or
quadruple your profit. But is that all there is to success?
IN FACT, NO. The first thing is to concentrate on what makes
the most difference - not what you like or find most interesting
or congenial. But most people don't. Mark Twain had a good
joke about it: "To a man with a hammer everything looks like a
nail."
Why creative gets more attention than it deserves
Creative is fun. We all like playing with words and pictures and with today's whiz-bang technology you can make videos
and do podcasts and all that groovy stuff.
The devil is, though, that good creative is damned hard to
do. Most of us professional scribes can tell you that one way or
another long copy works better than short. But knowing that is
useless if you do not know how to write long copy. It is very,
very hard, no matter how many people tell you their magic system
will do it all for you.
"A gifted product is mightier than the gifted pen" - David Ogilvy
As a writer I'd love to think creative is the most important
element in success. But it isn't.
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Are you fixing the right thing?

So if you sometimes wonder why despite all your studies you are
not doing too well it may be because you have got your priorities upside
down. In my experience most marketers have. They will spend
10 times as much time looking at creative elements as
examining other things which may be more boring but are
infinitely more important.
First and most important, by a very long chalk, comes what
you deliver and how well people relate to it. By that I mean the
quality of your product or service and its positioning. Improving
what you sell or altering the way people perceive it will have
more impact on your results than anything. That includes every
aspect of that product and service - such as how it is delivered.
Dell became the leaders in their field as a result of a number of
things, one of which was selling directly. Another, offering people
a tailor-made computer.
Ogilvy & Mather, with whom I worked for a number of years,
were very hot on research because David Ogilvy's background
included a spell with Gallup Research. They discovered that the
positioning of what you offer was the most important element
in advertising.
Positioning?
I think it is your character or personality. I often quote the
former Chairman of J Walter Thompson, Dr John Treasure, who
described it by saying:, "Why do I love one
woman rather than another? It is not just a matter
of physical attributes". Or take a couple of
examples from a totally different field to the one
you usually read about here, booze.
Which booze do you prefer?
Jack Daniel's Whiskey is hugely successful
largely because of its positioning. I bet you When you choose,
the image is
couldn't tell it from other whiskeys by taste
alone. But it is distilled in a quaint little town what sways you.
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in Tennessee by down-to-earth folks who are clearly as honest as

the day is long. They would never sell you or make a lousy
whiskey.
In England the largest selling beer is
Stella, which originates in Belgium. When it
was originally launched it had what might
politely be called a nothing positioning.
They could have played on the Belgian heritage
- Belgium is famous for its beers - but they
played on nothing.
The original ad was "there is a terrific
draught (or draft) in here". It's just a play on A lesson from Stella:
words. There was no real thinking behind How to communicate
your premium
it. The beer was then re-launched with an
position?
appeal based upon its strength. It was
Charge more.
slightly stronger than other lagers. This did
not make that much headway. Then it was launched again with
the proposition "reassuringly expensive" and that did the trick.
Higher price implies higher quality.
Before we get to the creative bit we love there are a few other
things you should consider.
The most important element is the one that makes direct
marketing, particularly on-line, so powerful. That is the ability
to test, measure and research what is happening as a result of
what you are doing or you plan to do.
I have lost count of the number of times people have come
to me bent upon doing something without the faintest idea of
whether it is likely to work or not in advance, or the faintest
idea afterwards whether it did work or not.
The blessings conferred by Google
I would say Google Analytics is the most powerful weapon
marketers have been given since the advent of the coded coupon
in newspapers.
And I am still astounded that so many people are conducting
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marketing on the internet without taking advantage of the

extraordinary facilities offered by Google, which you all know
about.
There are many people who are more qualified to talk about
this than I am so I will shut up, except to say how astounded I
have been over the years by another simple thing that could be
done - yet which most people do not bother to do.
I once had a job which involved me going around the world
to Ogilvy & Mather offices stirring up trouble, looking out for
good people, giving advice, talking to clients, making presentations
and commenting on creative work.
Time and time again I would be shown a piece of work and
asked why it had failed; and time and time again I would say
"have you rung the people who received it to find out?" Almost
invariably the answer was "no".
Simply asking people whether they received something or
recall receiving it, whether they understood it and what they
thought it said and why they did not reply is so laughably simple
and yet so important that I am astounded so few people bother
with it.
Gary Halberts marketing tip
The next most important thing is targeting. About 28 years ago
I wrote in my book Commonsense Direct Marketing that even
the worst message sent to the right people will do better than
the most brilliant message sent to the wrong people.
Gary Halbert put it rather well when he used to say the most
important advantage in marketing if you were running a
hamburger joint was to have a starving crowd.
The next most important thing generally speaking is the
incentive, because what I give you is going to be far more
important than any bullshit I can come out with.
Sometimes deciding not to have an incentive can be important.
When I worked for the Franklin Mint during their glory days
they repeatedly tested incentives - and they never worked. They
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went against the positioning of the Franklin Mint which was a

sort of rarefied upmarket approach.
This brings me full circle - to the thing everybody likes to
spend their time on, yet which is so difficult to achieve: better
creative.
But remember, it is NOT the key to success you may imagine.
What are you supposed to take away from this?
Get your priorities right. Most people don't. Most people like to
concentrate on what they enjoy most - the creative bit. It is
important - but by no means the most important element. Often
the least important.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Your product and positioning are the most

important elements
Creative is fun but its NOT the key to success. A good ad
cant save a bad product.
Concentrate on what makes the most difference.
Higher price implies higher quality.
What you like and what sells are usually different things.

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HELPFUL IDEA 44:

The eternal battle between sales and marketing
Bad results whose fault?
In far too many firms, sales and marketing who should
be natural partners are sworn enemies. Why?
I WAS IN SHANGHAI doing a few seminars a while ago.
It's a dizzying place. Every time I looked out of my hotel
window the building they were putting up had gained another
storey in the night, because people were working 24 hours a day.
Ambitions there are limitless - but not many people understand
marketing well. However they are by no means stupid - I would
say (and results in many universities tend to confirm this) they
are smarter than most Westerners, and ask highly relevant questions.
An ancient problem
One man asked me to explain the relationship between sales and
marketing. This made me think about a problem we come up
against time and again. As Thomas Watson Jr of IBM put it,
"Nothing happens in business until something gets sold."
Many of the people we work with who are in sales appreciate
that unless they have a full pipeline of leads the business is in
trouble. More to the point, they are in trouble - because they're
judged by sales results. And why are they in trouble?
Very often because although they have to produce the results,
they don't have the money - the marketing budget. The marketing
director has that. And he or she is often more concerned with
things like branding and advertising. Lamentable, really.
Results: impasse - and very often bad blood between sales
and marketing.
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What's the answer?

Collaboration.
In far too many firms, sales and marketing - who should be
natural partners - are sworn enemies.
The sales people see the marketing folk as a bunch of highfalutin' theorists who know nothing about the real world. The
marketers regard the sales people as a bunch of unsophisticated
oafs. Yet the truth is - as you would know if you ever had to take
money off people face to face, that selling is damn hard work.
Get sales and marketing folk to talk to each other. Get them
to explain each other's problems. Then get each side to come up
with solutions - for the other side's problems. A session which
involved doing this would achieve a lot more than some of the
stuff that passes for training in business.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Sales and marketing should be partners.

Trick is to get them to TALK to each other.

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HELPFUL IDEA 45:

How Claire, Jose and I nearly sold the unsellable
Ignore the experts.
It could be the most profitable move you make this year.
One of my clients' results are up around 30%, even in the
middle of the dire recession. Maybe one reason is revealed
in an email they got. It read:
I receive emails from you regularly, and could no longer resist writing
back to you to say that you have a very salesy and persuasive approach!!
Your messages sell, cajole and persuade, without being arrogant, aggressive, unpleasant or intrusive!! I have no plans to go to Spain, but because of your emails - have seriously considered it, and have nearly
committed and booked on DoYouSpain a couple of times over the last few
weeks! And that is saying something, because I consider myself to be
normally "sales-proof"!
Well, I'd like to take all the credit for that. But two other
people wrote a few of those emails. They are Jose, the boss of
DoYouSpain.com and his trusty marketing sidekick, Claire. I
like to think my training helped. In fact one of my trainees,
Alex, has helped with nifty ideas too.
What made that email even more interesting was the first
sentence:
I have been in sales and marketing for many years, and am confident
that I can recognize an effective sales person/approach when I come across
one.
And the last:
So, just to let you know, when the need arises to book a hire car, I will
be booking with you!
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What you can learn from it

There is another lesson from all this. When Jose and I started
working together last year they were sending out one email a
week.
Now it's usually two - and sometimes three. If your messages
are good enough you can say "phooey" to all the "experts" who
tell you not to email to people too often. In fact it seems you
can damn nearly sell things to people who don't want what
you're selling
The secret is, you can't bore people into buying.
So if you want someone to charm them into giving you money,
you know where I am. And if you wonder if this is just a lot of
hokum, here's a list of my clients from the last couple of years
or so:
Nielsen Research (International)
Prudential Assurance (U.K)
Stanley Gibbons (World's largest Stamp Dealers)
The Royal Mint (Coins)
Ivanhoe Cycles Retailers (Australia)
Young Driver - Driving Courses (U.K)
DoYouSpain - Car Rental (Spain)
LRN - Ethical Business Strategy (U.K)
Pimsleur Language Courses (U.S)
Oaklands - Independent Financial Advisors (U.K)
Foschini - Women's Fashion (South Africa)
William Westmacott - Saville Row Tailoring (U.K)
Top Shop - Women's Fashion (U.K)
WOW Carpet Cleaning (U.K)
Lexis Nexis - Legal Publishing (U.K)
Journeys of Distinction Luxury Holidays (U.K)
Leger Holidays (Coach Holidays) (U.K)
Equiniti (Financial Services) UK
Virgin Wines (U.K.)
The Institute of Direct Marketing - Education (UK)
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IQPC - Publishing and Conferences (International)

Ocean Villas - International Property
(Thailand and Hong Kong)
Results - Executive Coaching (UK)

Some of these people want better copy. Some want their stuff
critiqued. Some want training. Some want cheaper, better leads
on line. They all want to do better in tough times. Sixteen of
those nineteen have come back for more - twelve repeatedly. The
other three were just one project - so far.
The other day one came back after a year's careful measurement
and said the results were "staggering". This is not entirely
unknown.
Do you want to increase your sales and profits?
If you're interested, don't sit on your hands. We can only take on
a very limited number of jobs, because I only work with
colleagues who know what they're doing - and I am involved in
everything.
Email me at: drayton@draytonbird.com. I try to reply to
every message personally.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

You cant bore people into buying.

Communicate with your customers and prospects
whenever you have something interesting to say.
If you want better results, why not try my agency?
I guarantee results or you dont pay.

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HELPFUL IDEA 46:

What some famous copywriters taught me
Strictly for those interested in copy.
Few copywriters study enough. And many who commission
copy study even less. So the partially-sighted serve the
blind. No wonder most copy isn't very good.
I'VE ALWAYS LIKED this old New York joke:
A man asks for directions. "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"
"Practice," comes the reply.
Practice starts with study. Only if you have studied do you
have any idea what to practice at.
I started studying how to write copy before I even got a job
in advertising. I sat in Manchester Public Library and read everything I could find.
I have never stopped. If others have done the job before you,
start by studying and copying the best people you can find. It's
the only way to learn.
How copywriters fall and how you can rise
Most copywriters study little, if at all. They think the key is ingenuity and clever ideas. They put their faith in flair and luck. They
"pick it up" as they go along. That is why most copy is so bad.
Their chances of success are not improved by those who
employ them or commission copy, few of whom know much
about the subject either.
Of all the kinds of copy, direct response is the hardest, yet
few clients pay very well for it. To make big money you have to
get a royalty deal, which is a rare and wonderful beast outside
North America.
If you pay peanuts you get monkeys, so most copy is not very
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good. A shame, as it is perhaps the cheapest ingredient in success.

I have never specialised in any kind of copy: I take my
money where I can get it. But the principles that apply to one
kind of copy apply to all kinds of copy. What's more, I have
found they apply equally to all messages designed to get results
- speeches, articles, presentations: you name it.
Here are some of the people I learned from. Maybe you will, too.
Meet the father of a free trial
I suspect I learned most from John E. Powers - possibly the first
really professional copywriter.
He talked about what a product does for the customer,
rather than what it is. He popularised the free trial offer and the
money back guarantee. To this day many do not realise the
effectiveness of those three things.
In an interview he said, "The first thing ... is to have the
attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next
thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever's
wrong in the merchant's business. If the truth isn't tellable, fix
it so it is. That is about all there is to it."
Discover two undervalued war horses
His two chief weapons were honesty and giving reasons for his
claims - rather than just plain boasting.
This is called the reason-why technique. Only a week or so
ago someone wrote to me saying they had tried it and it made all
the difference. Just think! Here is something introduced in the
mid 19th century. Yet most marketers still don't know about it.
Powers also said to his interviewer, who was from Printer's
Ink, the advertising trade paper, "Never read any of those
advertising publications. They ain't worth reading." That was
in the 1890's, so nothing much has changed:

To this day many people think unsubstantiated

boasting works - look at most car advertising. It
doesn't. Not in real life. Not in copy. And if you
don't explain why you are so good, people tend to
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disbelieve you. Both these facts are unknown to

many marketers, but my partners and I have had
considerable success just by applying honesty.

And to this day people still imagine a bad product

can be saved by advertising. It can't; in fact good
advertising kills bad products faster.

13 apostles of scientific advertising

Claude Hopkins was perhaps the most able copywriter ever - so
good that allegedly by 1917 his boss used to give him a blank
cheque every year and let him set his own salary.
From his book Scientific Advertising (1923) I learned many
things, but principally that copy is "just salesmanship". Your
copy should do what a good salesman would do.
A salesman gives every good reason for buying; a salesman
forestalls objections; a salesman is not brief. Yet little copy does
a complete selling job, and many still imagine brevity works
best. It doesn't. Time after time, for nearly fifty years, I have
seen long copy beat short.
John Caples was the master of testing. I used to re-read his
book Tested Advertising Methods regularly when I was young.
I still turn to it.
From it I learned many, many things - but especially that as another good man, Richard V. Benson, put it, "There are only
two rules in direct marketing. Rule 1: Test everything. Rule 2:
Refer to rule 1."
Ogilvys secret
Two of my other teachers admired Caples.
David Ogilvy, with whom I worked for some years, was one.
He told me that he and Rosser Reeves agreed that they learned
all they knew from Caples.
He also told me one night over dinner that the secret of success
was charm - and that "the customer is not a moron: she is your
wife". So I try to avoid the usual crass, copywriter's English and
treat the reader like an intelligent person. It seems to work.
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David was a great student. He encouraged me in my belief

that study was the key.
His book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, had an enormous
influence on me in my first big job as a creative director: I used
to test things he mentioned, like the use of certain words which
increase readership.
Then when I wrote my own first business book, Commonsense
Direct Marketing, I copied his idea of making it very personal.
People are more interested in people than theory.
Reeves' book Reality in Advertising expressed and then sold
the idea of the USP- thre Unique Selling Proposition.
I learned that you need to be able to offer something different and better to succeed. So I spend a lot of time looking for it.
And I still find that giving a competitive argument usually increases response - yet few bother to do it.
Many years ago a friend asked me if I'd like to go and work
for Reeves as a creative director; I wanted to stay in England for
some personal reasons so I said "no". I suspect I would have
learned a lot, though.
Vic Schwab was partner in one of the first specialist direct
response agencies, back in the '30's. He wrote a book called How to
Write a Good Advertisement. I have had the same copy for 45 years. And
I still refer to the list of 100 headlines in it when I'm stuck for idea.
There are many others I knew and am indebted to. Bill Jayme,
Gene Schwartz, Joe Karbo, Monroe Kane, Murray Raphel,
Denny Hatch, Joe Sugarman, Gary Halbert and others.
And I still study in the hope that one day I'll really know
what I'm doing.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Benefits, free trial and money back guarantee still works well.
Some of the worlds greatest copywriters and advertisers
used old proven principles and flourished. Why not do
the same?
Study could be your secret to success.
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HELPFUL IDEA 47:

Where the money leaks away
Beware organised bribery.
Some time ago a man asked for my views on customer
retention and was intrigued to know what I feel about
"more structured customer retention programmes - loyalty
cards, tactical retention teams etc." I think firms lose millions
every day because of poor - or unimaginative - attention to
customers. That is why the word "churn" comes up time and
again.
HERE IS WHAT I wrote to him:
1. If you look for greater profit keeping people longer is the easiest
method; these people - assuming you deliver what you promise
- are money for jam.
2. Any method is better than no method.
3. Most firms tend, like lustful bachelors, to devote themselves
to the thrill of the chase - acquisition - rather than retention.
4. I don't like loyalty cards. They are organised bribery. A zero
sum game - "everyone else has one; so must we". Giving
something real - better service - seems to me better.
5. I tend to hate teams of all kinds, I'm afraid. I doubt if Einstein
was much of a team player. But this is a personal quirk.
6. I would prefer a loose structure, where people are asked to
164

come up with ideas that will make customers happier as often as

they can.
7. But I guess in large organisations managers think things
should run in a way that minimises the need to think, which
means teams and processes are important. I suspect that is why
many people in such organisations are not very happy.
Firms are quite exceptionally bad when it comes to regular
service messages sent to customers.
These are actually far more important, relevant and interesting
to customers than the promotional stuff firms focus on.
But they are not seen as "creative", so are given to very junior
people to do. Sheer folly. Few of these people can write well,
thanks to our laughable educational system.
One insurance firm hired me twice to rewrite their service
messages. Not much fun for me, but very important for them
and their customers.
(They hired me twice because a new marketing director
came in after the first time and said my messages were too long
and - you guessed it - not "creative" enough. Buffoon.)

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

If you look for greater profit keeping people longer is the

easiest method.
Most firms tend, like lustful bachelors, to devote themselves to the thrill of the chase acquisition rather than
retention.
Regular service messages sent to customers matter more
than you may think. Get them right.
I don't like loyalty cards. They are organised bribery.

165

HELPFUL IDEA 48:

I wouldnt do that if I were you
21 common ways to sink your firm and I have another 128 for you.
Here are 21 stupid things that can screw up your business:
1. Ignore the lessons of the past (Assume they didnt know as much
200 years ago)
2. Think you can pick it up as you go along
3. Be creative assume that what you think is wonderful will sell
4. Have too many meetings
5. Not try being a customer
6. Hire a Marketing Director without looking at his past record
7. Fall for the latest fad
8. Believe human nature is altered by media or changing times
9. Assume biz decisions are made logically
10. Get up your own arse over brand guidelines
11. Talk like a marketing person
12. Try to make it perfect
13. Believe anyone who says they
This little list grew
can make you rich
like
topsy, Eventually
14. Assume your prospect is intelligent
I
compiled
a list of
15. Assume your prospect is stupid
149
which
I
presented
16. Read about nothing but marketing
with
some
glee
to an
17. Fail to test
audience at The
18. Imagine everything will be OK
Royal Mail. Someone
19. Spend more energy imagination and
asked me, Why 149?
money on prospects than customers
I replied,
20. Assume anything is always, or never
Because that's all I
the case
had time for.
21. Fail to invest in your staff
166

HELPFUL IDEA 49:

Recipe for extraordinary results?
Questions, questions, questions
I once emailed my list about my partner Bill Fryer - and
the "explosive" results he gets. People asked "How does
he do it" - and in one case "Is this really you in disguise,
Drayton". It is not me. And this is what he said is his secret:
ATTENTION TO DETAIL.
A great copywriter once told me that great creative work
with poor marketing behind it rarely does well.
In order to succeed you need good marketing first and then
you need to top that off with good creative. This is at the back
of my mind every time I talk to a new client.
So, whenever I get a brief, I question it a lot. I ask myself:

What is the client trying to do here?

What is special/different about this product/service?
Why would anyone actually want to buy it?
Why would they want to buy it today?
Who are they planning to send this to/what media
is it going into?
What testimonials, scientific evidence, celebrity
endorsement do they have?

I try and find out as much as possible about the product and the
market and I try and think about someone who might want to buy
it and where they are at when they see that piece of advertising.
I also try and sell the product to people (usually my wife)
167

and see if I can convince someone/her to buy/want it. I use this

as a way to rehearse sales arguments.
Bill who?
Bill has a good mind and is very ingenious. Here's something he
did when he was doing his PhD (the third PhD I have worked
with: all have done well).
A town in a valley did not receive terrestrial TV signals but got
their TV piped in by cable.
A split test was done on the town with a headache pill
company. They looked in people's medicine cabinets at the start,
then fed ads into one side of the town but not the other.
When they inspected people's cabinets after the test something
interesting happened. When you asked people if they bought the
pills (post advertising) both sides of the town had the same
response. But when you looked in their medicine cabinets the
advertised to half had a far, far higher purchase rate.
Bill is a very interesting man. He came to me for a job maybe
12 years ago. I didn't have room. So he went away and started his
own agency in a tiny office in a small town in the countryside called
Warminster.
Then I became his chairman, which involves keeping out of the
way. He has a line I love: We're the small agency in the middle of
nowhere that charges a lot less, beats the big agencies - and can
prove it.
Bill is very quiet and seems very serious, but when you get to
know him you realise he is quite crazy and extremely funny. We
have lots of laughs together. Incidentally, I often quote the Duke
of Wellington, who said the secret of his success was attention to
detail.
Another secret of success is to eat your own cooking. Rather
than just try to sell clients products, Bill decided to set up his own
mail order business. He does very well. I do the same in my
business.

168

One of the brightest young people I ever hired as a young art

director impressed me because he, too, started a mail order business
on the side. Today he is hugely successful, having been named the
best creative director in Asia which is quite a large continent.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

To solve a problem, try to express it as a question. It helps

you think.
In order to succeed you need good marketing first.
And then you need to top that off with good creative.
Find out as much as possible about the product and the
market.
Before you write, try to sell the product in person.

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HELPFUL IDEA 50:

What little I know about management
Avoid managing by fear.
I really don't like a lot of management people. They care
more about their careers than their staff, let alone their
customers. Jack Welch said, "Most people have their
heads pointing to the chairman and their asses towards
the customers".
IT WOULD BE FLATTERING to say I am not much of a manager.
I can recall only reading three books on the subject: Alfred P.
Sloan, My Years with General Motors, Up the Organisation by Robert
Townsend and The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. I am
lucky to have realised my incompetence and always seek other
people to run things.
What matters
I think your staff matter even more than your customers. Without
them you won't be able to serve those customers. The best managers can get people to do things they wouldn't do for anyone else.
And make them do things they never thought they could do.
A friend left a big firm to start up on his own. His entire staff
followed him. His firm was winning awards within months, and
has grown incredibly fast. He has been successful wherever he has
gone - with admired brands you would instantly recognise.*
How I escaped failure as a manager
One way or another I have found myself managing, or rather mismanaging people quite a lot over the years. I have only escaped
failure for two reasons. First, I think business should be fun.
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Second, I believe in management by walking around.

Someone recently told me they still recall me walking around
the offices of my old agency thirty years ago wearing a silly
leopard hat with ears. I'm not sure I entirely recommend that as
a clever approach. But it's better than sitting in meetings talking
rubbish about brand values.
All this occurs to me because I have been watching changes in
an organisation I know fairly well for the last year or two. The old
boss is intensely personal. Everyone knows he is there. He walks
around and talks to people. The new one never does. Not a good
sign.
* If you want to know his secrets - they are revealed in my EADIM videos.
His firm is called Naked Wines

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

I think your staff matter even more than your customers.

Without them and without you recognizing them
and what they do you won't be able to serve those
customers.
The best managers can get people to do things they
wouldn't do for anyone else. And make them do things
they never thought they could do.

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HELPFUL IDEA 51:

Advice on brands
Back by popular request.
When I mentioned this on my blog I got the biggest response
I have ever received.
And for good reason:

A strong brand has an almost miraculous effect on

your business.
People pay more for something that is no better than
alternatives - and sometimes worse.
They pay more just for what your brand says about
them - even though they know it is no better than
the unbranded alternative.
Otherwise sane business-people spend (and sometimes waste) umpteen millions - because they think,
for example, that rebranding is a good idea.
If your brand is strong, either you make more money
by selling more items at the same price.
Or you make more by selling the same number of
items at a higher price.
You get more repeat purchases; and customers stay
with you longer.
People forgive your mistakes.
Customer lifetime value - the only sensible measure
for marketing investment - is greater to you.
If you make and sell more, economies of scale mean
you can undercut and eventually kill the competition.
You can afford more to get a customer in the first place.
In short, you can out-gun your competitor at every turn.
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You can live off the "fat" of your brand for years without even
advertising. It is like a business safety net. Your brand lives on
when people die. Managers come and go. Factories may move from
one country to another. Products change. But your brand can live
on forever.
Your brand should be in the back of your mind every time you
write or send out a message or make a business decision.
What does it stand for?
And when you answer that question, dont get marooned in a
swamp of fancy marketing jargon about business missions and
corporate values.
Ask yourself what you want your customers to say about you.
Theyre the people who
What is your ideal answer? What kind of business do you
want to be?
When you answer that, you create your own future.

THINGS TO CONSIDER:

If your brand is strong, you can out-gun your competitor

at every turn.
It can make people pay more for something that is no
better than alternatives - and sometimes worse.
Plus customer lifetime value is greater to you.
So you can afford more to get a customer in the first
place.

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BONUS TIP:
Discover the hidden marketing power
of easy-to-make videos
This may be one of the most useful things you read this year.
UNLESS YOU'RE LIVING ON THE MOON moon you know
videos have become a powerful selling tool you can't ignore.
And you probably know you OUGHT to be using video - but
have never got round to it because you don't see quite WHY it
works so well. So here's why - and it's not just because of the
internet. In fact my partner Bill Fryer says that a video on a web
site on average triples conversions.
It's also because there are two types of media. Those you welcome and seek out. And those you avoid or ignore.
You don't look forward to receiving direct mail. You don't
wake up thinking you'd like to read the newspaper ads. If you're
like most people you are irritated by the inserts that tumble out of
your magazine. You don't stop the car to look at the posters.
When the TV ads come on you go and make tea. And you
want to kill the people who send you recorded telephone messages
- and even more those who make you listen to their automated
horrors when you just want to find out something important to
you.
But there are other media you like and welcome. Customer
magazines are an example. They work because people like
magazines, and they don't feel they're being sold to or if they do,
they dont mind.
What people really do online?
You and I know that the one medium that's still growing is the
internet. And what is growing on the internet? Video.
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Your customers love video. It's a medium they prefer. They

don't go on the internet just to be entertained (though they do find
it entertaining). They don't go primarily to buy things (though
they do buy things as a result). They don't go primarily to talk to
friends (though they do talk to friends).
They go primarily to find things out. It's their first port of call.
As I write the greatest source of videos on the internet is
YouTube. It's also the 2nd biggest search engine - and could well
overtake Google itself. It's serving well over one billion views a
day. That's 41,666,667 views an hour. So this is something no sane
business person can ignore.
Two golden rules
The golden rule in targeting is: go where your customers go. The
golden rule in marketing is: give your customers what they want.
A while ago Peter Ruppert, Founder & President of
Entertainment Media Research discovered that 74% of people
who buy things visit Youtube at least once a fortnight and often
many times a day. I know I do. Don't you?
Your prospects use it to find out about products and services,
see demonstrations of recipes, for instance - and find about things
they need to know in their jobs. (So it's important if you sell to
businesses).
This alone is significant, but its logical corollary is - you will
not be surprised to know - that these people decide what to buy as
a result of what they see on YouTube. On top of this, a startling one
in five of these people WANT to subscribe to the video channels
of people who want to sell to them.
How often do you hear of customers who want to be sold to?
Very few, I imagine! If you've ever wondered, even for a second,
whether you're wise to look into what video can do for you, and
what matters most - stop wondering, and keep reading.
Don't misunderstand me. I don't mean the answer to every
problem is to stick something on YouTube any more than you are
sure to find it on the internet. I mean quite simply that people love
videos - so you should be considering them.
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What I've learned about video

When we analyse clients' websites, almost the first thing we look
at is whether they have videos, and how they use them. I've now
been making videos, I am alarmed to realise, since 1985, when I
made one to introduce direct marketing to Unilever.
It took all day in the height of summer in a stuffy Soho basement.
I got two things right - and one thing wrong. The content was
good (so good I shamelessly copied much of it for another video I
did for Nestle). The film was good for that period. But it lacked
sincerity. It was probably a little too slick.
People don't buy slick, believe me, in any medium. But they
do buy sincerity. Plenty of people make videos in their back rooms.
Any video is better than no video. As long as they seem sincere
and arent too amateurish, they work.
If you know what youre talking about if you are enthusiastic
about it if you care enough to transmit that enthusiasm
You, your sincerity and a cheap video camera will do the trick.

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