A perfect piece of useless research

02/07/2008 by Tony Attwood.

There is a report doing the rounds at the moment, which has been commented on in several places, in which the following question is asked:

“What is your best performing mailer (postcard, voucher, 6×9 etc) and is the recent postage hike and weakened economy forcing you to re-adjust your direct mail strategy? If so, how and why?”

Apparently lots of people answered by saying that the postcard was best for retail, marketing, healthcare and software.

Which on the face of it, looks amazing. Except for one problem.

As a study of the psychology of perception shows, how a person reacts to a mailer depends very much on how well they know the sender. In one way this is obvious - I read postcards from my daughters word by word, I keep them, I read them again. I’m soppy that way.

A postcard from a firm I’ve never heard of selling something that I am not responsible for buying doesn’t get me going at all.

As I say, that’s obvious. But what is not so obvious is the fact that we make our decisions as to how to treat these item according to how we perceive the sender. That affects the amount of brain power we give to the piece. Then, whether we read the piece or not is further affected by how much brain power it demands (lots and lots for colour pictures, far less for text).

So without knowing whether the postcards were sent to customers in love with their suppliers or just to a cold list, and without knowing whether the postcard contained pictures and other high demanding things or not - we are not getting very far.

Likewise we don’t know if the people who said “postcards is best” actually tried testing against anything else - like A4 letters. And if they did, did they keep the content the same.

And then we don’t know if (perhaps by chance) they obeyed the rules of the psychology of perception on the postcards but not on the letter.

In short, we know nothing. It was, at least as reported, a wholly useless piece of research. There are snippets in there which are worthwhile but not enough to start giving us proper stats on which to make a judgement.

All this is bad enough - but the worst thing is that this piece of research is just how much people everywhere are repeating it without questioning it. No wonder quite a few firms in the US felt the rise in postage prices was affecting them if they really are following this type of generalised advice.

Tony Attwood

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