Archives: Direct Mail

There’s a bank handing out fake Life Membership certificates to its customers, a conceit so confusing and poorly executed it makes me want to hand them a great big trophy for the ‘Worst Direct Mail of the Year’. A bit of foiling and embossing can’t disguise what a crock this is.

OK, so it’s just a bit of a laff, a cheesy attempt by a bank to say something nice to its customers, which is not easy when you’re busy out-sourcing operations overseas while making billion dollar profits off poor saps who don’t know what they’ve signed up for. Perhaps that explains why this example is so cack-handed. It takes practice to be friendly in a genuinely human-to-human way. Instead the bank has resorted to forced fakery, taking a punt that the customer will receive the communication in the right spirit, a hope based on nothing more than guesswork and a deluded belief in the hilarity of its own marketing.

Putting the goofiness aside, let’s just look at it seriously for a moment on its own terms, because a lot of money has been spent on creating this fakery and sending it out. It must mean something, must have something to say for itself.

So, as far as I understand it, this is a certificate sent to the recipient – let’s pretend the blurred bit says Harry Knobbleknees – to inform Harry Knobbleknees that he has been granted life membership of the Harry Knobbleknees Appreciation Society by the bank. It’s said to be a “symbolic” membership and has been granted “in honour of your special character”.

Some questions readily spring to mind, most pressingly as to why Harry Knobbleknees would want to be a member of his own Appreciation Society? Isn’t that just a trifle narcissistic? Who formed this society anyway and why has it been left to the bank to hand out memberships? How many other members are there? Is it just Harry Knobbleknees and the bank? How sad is that.

What the hell is a “symbolic membership” anyway? Presumably it gives Harry Knobbleknees symbolic entry to the Society’s symbolic meeting room and a symbolic vote at the AGM. For life.

And why is Harry Knobbleknees being given life membership of his own appreciation society in recognition of his “banking relationship” with the said bank? Does that mean he would be denied membership if he didn’t have such a relationship? That’s a bit cruel. Just who the hell put the bank in charge anyway? I bet Harry Knobbleknees didn’t vote for them.

Also, how come the bank is so sure that Harry Knobbleknees has a “special” character? Are they spying on him? For all they know, he might be very ordinary indeed. And proud of it. And if they don’t know, does that mean the bank is lying when it says it is honouring his character? Would you give your money to a bank that tells lies?

Perhaps instead of running the Harry Knobbleknees Appreciation Society, the bank should just get on with doing bank-like things. You know, like making sure there are enough tellers in the bank so that Harry Knobbleknees doesn’t have to queue up every time he visits the bank, or making sure that drug cartels aren’t shovelling billions of dollars through their accounts without anybody noticing.

It is hard to get people to take notice of direct mail. It can be very irritating. But there’s no point in getting customers to look at stuff if the message is muddled or meaningless; save the money and spend it on something that they might really appreciate, like better customer service.

So let’s be perfectly clear here: if you’re going to write ‘Something special for you’ on your direct mail and have it visible in the address window with the appearance of having been hand-written by you especially for me, like a friend, like a special friend might write a message on the envelope – Sealed with a kiss, NORWICH – if you’re going to do that, actually pretend to be a friend with something special to offer an especially special person, then whatever is inside the envelope had better be PRETTY BLOODY SPECIAL.

If not, there will be consequences. Dire consequences. Your credibility will be shredded and I’ll never believe anything you tell me ever again. Moreover, I’ll tell all my friends (yes, I have some) that you can’t be trusted and that anything you say should be totally dissed and treated like the naked, evil, conniving LIE that it is.

So whatever is inside that envelope had better not be the ‘opportunity’ to save 10% when I spend lots of money with you by signing up for something I don’t really want. That’s not special. That’s really very ordinary indeed. It had better not be an invitation to attend a ‘seminar’ with the chance to win something I probably won’t win and certainly don’t want. That’s not special either. And please don’t make it a ‘Special Introductory Offer’. I’ve had those before and they never work out.

So… SPORTSCRAFT (for that is who it is), what ‘special’ thing have you got for me inside that envelope?

[drum roll]

And you know, it’s not bad at all. It’s a $20 gift card and birthday wishes. That’s nice. That’s more than I get from some family members (you know who you are).

So… well done SPORTSCRAFT, that was a pleasant experience.

It’s good to see a direct mail piece that works because, when it does, it’s a reminder of just how powerful DM can be as a marketing medium. It’s got great cut-through. Equally, when it’s bad, it can be a totally pointless exercise, like sending smoke signals in a cyclone.

A lot of work has gone into this little envelope – the creative, the data management, the production of the plastic gift card, getting all the variable data to print in the right place, marrying up all the different elements. Because it works, I imagine it’s probably been road tested to the nth degree but, like all good DM campaigns, you can see where the money has been spent.

The other thing I like about this print item is that the trigger for it was an online purchase. We hear a lot about how the internet is killing print but here’s a print item that came into existence because of the internet. It’s a different sort of print – variable data, plastic card – but it highlights how the different media can work together, reinforcing the customer contact, prolonging the retail experience. In all likelihood, the print item will generate another online transaction and so on.

The experts call this ‘cross-media’ communication or marketing. I’ve sat through quite a few seminars about it over the years and usually I have no idea what the people who espouse it are going on about but, by way of confirmation that it does actually exist, here’s an living, breathing example of it in the wild. Special indeed.

As we all know, the first challenge of any direct mail item is to get the recipient to open up, to interrupt the habitual response which results in unwanted items being transferred from post box to waste bin in a matter of seconds. Of course, there will always be those saddos with nothing better to do than to read everything that crosses their path regardless of its utility. These are the sort of people who usually wind up blogging about it. Endlessly. Moronically.

Nobody cares about these types, certainly not the producers of the direct mail. They want customers, people who will respond to a carefully-crafted daub of pigmented liquid deposited on a flat cellulose-based substrate in such a way as will, ultimately, result in them handing over some money. Marketing folk like to dress it up in terms of ‘building a relationship’ or ‘having a conversation’ with the customer but, hey, what do they know? As Bill Hicks once put it, they are merely “Satan’s spawn filling the world with violent garbage…”

But back to the question of how to get the attention of these very important people who, as we all know equally well, are being bombarded with up to 3,000 commercial messages every day? Great, great photography works for me, as does a beautiful piece of print but part of it is also being able to elicit the right question, particularly if that question is, “What the….?”

That’s the tactic of this four-page direct mail piece from a bank which is printed CMYK plus a special [insert bank brand here] red on coated stock and then die-cut and folded to represent the face of an over-large Motorola pager.

“Why?” you might ask. Indeed, that is the question. It is an excellent question. It is the question that the creators of this piece are hoping will become irresistible to all people who receive it, driving them to rip open the flimsy polythene enclosure and satisfy their curiosity for once and for all.

It’s a brilliant idea alright, but only brilliant with the right people. I picked it up and my first response was, “Pager? Why would I want a stupid pager?” There is no hope.