Last week a college friend came up from Atlanta, husband and daughter in tow, for their annual trip to New York.
We went to an off-Broadway musical called Hank Williams: Lost Highway. Hank was a small town Alabama boy who became a great country singer in the late forties and early fifties. He never made it to 30 years old. Hank drank himself to death but not before he gave us Your Cheatin’ Heart, Honky Tonk Blues, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, Jambalaya, Hey Good Lookin’, I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You, and dozens more great tunes.
Jason Petty plays Hank in Lost Highway and he is just amazing. To me, Jason and his backup group sound better than the great Hank Williams and I said so to my friend as we were leaving the theater.
“Well, sure”, she said, “But he was imitating”. Hank didn’t imitate. He wrote new music, wrote new lyrics, arranged everything by himself and recorded every song in single takes. He did things nobody else had ever done. He was the first, the original, and everybody after him stands on his shoulders. They write plays about him.
And, of course, she was right.
History is full of people like that. They do things nobody else ever did and then along come the imitators. If they’re talented, the imitators make the original better. Without them, our televisions would still be small, round and in black and white. But the guy who invented that old TV was the genius. The people who came after him were merely clever. Direct Marketing is like that, too. Very few originals, lots of imitators. And the imitators don’t always make the original better.
Part of the problem is that most people think they’re better off being followers. Genuinely original ideas startle them. It’s not that they’re afraid to try something new; they think they don’t have to, so why bother? It’s as if they’ve been eating roast beef and mashed potatoes all their lives and then suddenly someone gives them sushi. They say things like “let’s not re-invent the wheel” and “we’ve always done it this way.” They get into a comfort zone imitating, but not improving.
They like Hank Williams now, but they wouldn’t have liked him back in 1948.
Banks and insurance companies are the worst offenders. They get in comfort zones and they do the same things over and over. You are pre-approved. Low APR. No medical exam required. Look after your loved ones. Safe driver discount. Our strength is our people. But that’s going to change. The Hank Williamses got involved. Whoever’s the Hank Williams over at Aflac gave us the frustrated duck and Geico’s Hank gave us their gecko and suddenly insurance looks different.
When our agency makes a creative presentation, we usually show three concepts: a breakthrough kind of idea which we usually love; a slightly more conservative (imitative) idea but with a little edge to it; and a safe idea which just follows the pack. Nowadays, most clients go with the safe idea.
We recently did a package for a bank. We loved it. The general idea was to get customers to start banking online. We showed a grandmother, her son Spike, and his son, Spike Jr. Granny banked online. The Spikes didn’t. The first line of the body copy read “The Spikes are idiots.” The line actually came from an art director who said to the copywriter “What you mean is the Spikes are idiots.” And the copywriter went with it. It was attention-getting and we envisioned a whole campaign around the “Spikes” but our client thought it was too edgy. At least she didn’t go with the safe idea. She went with #2 and it did very well. But no Spikes, which could have been great.
A while back we wondered what would happen if a bank ever wrote to prospects you’re 98.4% pre-approved. What would happen if a brokerage firm used testimonials from people they’d helped to get rich? What if direct marketers actually tested something that’s completely different, something way out of their comfort zones? The first one that makes it work will reap big benefits.
Here are some DM firsts. They boosted response and we all imitated them and made some of them better. They seem awfully old-fashioned now but they once made the followers gasp “Let’s not reinvent the wheel.”
- Eli Terry, a Connecticut clockmaker, pioneered the free trial back in 1798.
- Sears Roebuck, the first great cataloger started with an accidental shipment of gold watches back in 1866.
- Adressen-Mueller of Frankfurt, Germany began renting names in 1878.
- In 1905 Spiegel started offering credit.
- In 1893 Munsey’s Magazine cut subscription prices because they had discovered that they could lose money on circulation and more than recover it in increased advertising revenue.
- Johnson Box in 1957
- Sweepstakes: Reader’s Digest in the 1960′s
- Mag-a-log using a catalog with some editorial look and feel as a solicitation piece
- A penny for your thoughts and actually including the penny. Walter Weintz came up with this and his client approved it, even if it did add $10/M to the cost.
- Address Labels as premiums in fundraising direct mail
- $1 guilt money to thank people for filling in surveys.
- Johnson & Johnson started an information service for new mothers. Perhaps the first use of detailed, helpful information as a “feemium” to sell product.
- Lift note direct mail
- P.S., P.P.S., P.P.P.S.
- Long form letter. (The longest I’ve ever seen is 64 pages. The original Long form commercials from the 40′s that spawned infomercials. The one I liked best was for Vitamix.
So, how do you get to be the FIRST to have with a creative breakthrough. I think there are three or four things you have to do.
1. Determine to do something new. Just flat out refuse to be a follower. Just make sure you understand how direct marketing works. Our creative director does that. It makes us all crazy because we don’t even know what he’s talking about when he starts with a new idea. Then, when it all comes together, it’s usually great.
2. Get into your target audiences heads. What turns their cranks? It doesn’t matter what you like, what your bosses like, what any body else likes. What do the people your writing to like? How do they think? What’s important to them? We work with a company marketing collectibles of the Apollo space program. We talked to a space collector (my son, Paul) who recommended that we get a real spokesperson from the NASA space program to give our collection credibility. That changed our direction.
3. Great new ideas aren’t born fully-grown. They’re born like humans, messy, noisy and they keep you awake at night. Don’t abandon it. If it makes you nervous, that’s good. Our creative director, Mike McCormick, was told that a time-share client couldn’t do a radio commercial because the legal text was obligatory and way too long. It would bore people to tears. He turned the legal into song lyrics and had a chorus of lawyers sing it. It was hilarious.
4. Forget about budgets at first. Just come up with an idea. Seth Godin looked at things a different way when he fulfilled web orders for his new book, Purple Cow. He sends them out in a milk carton that had purple spots on it. It gets people talking because its a first. Once you get the idea you can figure out how to do it for the budget.
The idea is to go somewhere that no one has been before. There’s a great opportunity in this economy to do something unique that will move the needle. Restrictions on telemarketing and spam mean more companies will be moving back to direct mail. Now’s the time to jump out and be unique. A recent AOL survey shows that people still prefer to receive direct mail over e-mail and telemarketing. And don’t just think about acquisition, but apply this thinking to retention as well. I recently spent 5 days in the hospital with an intestinal problem. In the days after my release no one from the hospital or the five doctors who treated me, took the time to call to see how I was doing. Except for a nurse from my Oxford health care provider.
She called while I was recuperating to check on my condition, and gave me some helpful tips for follow up care. This was truly unique customer care. A lot like what Jo-Von Tucker from Clambake Celebrations does when she calls to check if you’ve received your order.
You can be first. Just make sure you test. Let me know what you’re doing. Send me your unique approaches. I’ll let you know what I think about them!
