Monthly Archive for May, 2011

High-level audiences? Treat them with respect

Published on May 20, 2011 in Corporate, Design, Direct and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

My credit card company sent me a mailer recently. It was so flimsy that I doubted the sales proposition even before I read it, and it wasn’t much of a surprise to find the offer totally valueless. Better to send me nothing than this kind of thing.

On the other hand, WildWest has proven over the years that producing high quality items (with a little imagination mixed in) really does produce good results.

Like? Like the two-part mailing we once developed for a software company. It was aimed at Times Top 250 finance directors – a market we thought was well nigh impossible to reach, let alone get response from. Our mailing had a theme – power and control. The message was that you can’t be powerful unless you are in control (our client’s software promised control over corporate expenditure).

Our pack contained a remote-control car – a bright red Porsche model. We branded and re-packaged it to reflect our message, and we sent it out with one omission. The controller for the car. You didn’t get that unless you sent back the card in the first pack.

There was no catch. No salesman would call (unless requested). No marketing material would be sent.

It wasn’t too much of a surprise to find that we had a 60% response rate within a week. What was more surprising was how many of our target market wanted to meet with our client and to find out more about that software. Our client – previously unknown in this market – suddenly had a hugely valuable sales pipeline.

The same theme is reflected in the work we have been doing with sports marketing agency, SMI.


Sports Media International market sponsorship packages in motorsport, sailing and soccer, and the really high quality marketing packs that we have developed for their clients (at Citroen Sport and Mahindra Racing) are both appropriate and respected. So too, with the brand-building photo-books which we produce for Barclays and their work with the Barclays Premier League.

The message is simple. If you have a high-quality product, you need high-quality materials to back it up. And of course, there’s no one better to meet those demands than WildWest design.

They’ve responded. And someone’s asleep..?

Published on May 12, 2011 in Direct and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A huge number of businesses don't even respond when people reply to direct marketing or advertising

According to an article in Harvard Business Review recently, some American companies, most of whom are putting more and more marketing budget into slick and captivating direct marketing campaigns, are wasting their money.

HBR tested responses from outbound email, from websites and from traditional direct marketing campaigns. Remember, they weren’t testing how or how many responses an individual campaign received, but instead looked at what happened to those responses.

Did anything happen? Was information promised actually sent? Did a salesperson call to check that the information had been received?

You’d think that firms would be slick at this kind of thing, but while some were, a massive 23% of all the HBR test responses went totally unanswered. Not just a slow reply, or a poor quality reply but no reply at all.

It all reminds me of a test that the Ford motor company did in the 1960′s. They found that in some instances, fewer people who had seen their advertising actually bought a Ford than those who had never seen some of their advertising. They might as well have spent an afternoon burning their money in the car park.

It all goes to prove that advertising and direct marketing is still struggling to become a science, and that more marketing people need to realise that marketing is an end-to-end process that doesn’t even stop with a purchase.