How common sense in direct marketing can do more harm than good

06/04/2008 by Tony Attwood.

In early 2001 a small group of direct mailers began contributing to a unique project which aimed to reform the way in which direct mail was understood.

The group’s aim was to turn direct mail into a science – a science which would allow users both to make much more accurate predictions as to which mailshot would have the best results than had hitherto been the case.

Up to this point most writers on direct mail had adopted a “common sense” approach – indeed one of the most popular books on direct mail at the time was called Commonsense Direct Marketing by Drayton Bird.  There was nothing new in this: the phrase “common sense” was also used by marketing writers such as Stefan Engeseth, Brenda Adbilla,  Steve W. Martin, Dave Majure and others.  In fact it is one of the most common phrases to be found in marketing books of all types.

Many of those of us who formed the Creative Direct group in 2001 had two worries about this approach.  One was that common sense arguments are in some circumstances unhelpful – as in the fact that common sense tells us that the earth is flat and that sun goes round the earth.  It takes scientific method and analysis to show us that this is untrue.

The other was that the common sense approach leaves no room for those areas of direct marketing that have already been explored by science – most notably the psychology of perception.   Common sense gives instant answers – leaving the scientist struggling in the wake as he/she laboriously makes predictions and follows the scientific method.

We therefore started on a long journey, pulling together such scientific study as there had been, testing the claims of gurus and experts, and basically looking for the science in direct marketing, rather than the common sense in direct marketing.

Many of our results have been written up on the theory of direct mail web site www.theory.bz and I am glad to say that almost at the work started to produce results.  Here’s just one (very much abbreviated) example of how the scientific approach takes on the common sense approach.

Two leaflets were produced advertising a book and were mailed through random mailings on the same day to the target audience.   Mailing A contained a colourful leaflet that had colour images of the cover next to the text.   Mailing B consisted of a simple A4 sheet of text in black, on yellow paper with no colour illustration.   The text of mailings A and B was identical in each case.  (Numerous other tests were carried out to ensure we were isolating individual criteria – I won’t bore you with all the details here).

The “common sense” prediction was that mailing with the colour would get a better response rate, on the grounds that colour looks better, gives a more professional feel and more confidence to the reader that the person selling the book is more reliable.

The scientific evidence drawn from studies in the psychology of perception suggested that the non-colour piece would do better on the grounds that colour can interfere with the way the brain of these particular readers would handle the message being put across.

Now of course the scientific argument here is much more complex than that – and even the detailed review of the science written up on the Theory website is itself just a summary.  As a result many “common sense” writers have just shrugged off the scientific approach, deliberately or accidentally being highly selective in the way they report the experiments, and dismissing what was months of work in a sentence.  It’s unfortunate that this has happened, but there’s not too much we can do about that.

However for those who are interested, the fact is that the common sense predictions that colour would work better were proven wrong, and the scientific prediction was proven to be right.    The same has happened over and over again.  It doesn’t happen in every case – there are exceptions, and the theory successfully predicts what those exceptions are – and why they are exceptions.

In doing this work what we have found is that on occasion by moving from the common sense to the scientific approach it is possible to double response rates – quite often it is possible to do far more than that.

The attempt to develop a theory of direct mail is on-going, and if you know of scientific experimental research that is relevant, please do drop me a line (tony@hamilton-house.com). In the meanwhile I hope you find the information on the Theory site (www.theory.bz) of interest.

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