The Encyclopedia of Advertising (15% Off!)

... by Alan Van Dine, © 2006, Light Verse for a Heavy Universe

Chapter 5: Direct Mail



Since there is no such thing as indirect mail, "direct mail" is just a redundant term for "mail" or "mailed advertising," which is poured into the postal system in such staggering volume that only a fool would assume it is all being delivered. In some quarters, direct mail is called "junk mail," for example in Congress, whose members tend to be experts on this subject since they all enjoy a franking privilege enabling them to advertise themselves to taxpayers, at taxpayers' expense -- the postal equivalent of a collect phone call.

Other advertisers have to pay their own postage, so they choose their mailing lists with care. Thus a spark plug manufacturer might mail product literature to a membership list of the Society of Automotive Engineers. A maker of feminine hygiene deodorants probably would not -- but might make a coupon or free-sample mailing to the subscriber list of Vogue. Actually, Vogue readers use more sparkplugs than automotive engineers do because there are more of them, but it’s the automotive engineers who specify what brands of spark plug the Vogue readers will get when they buy their cars. The advertiser targets his mailings to those who actually decide on the purchase. Hence the flea-collar company is looking for lists of pet owners and pet shops, not dogs and fleas.
 

Mail Order Advertising

It won't surprise you to learn that a great deal of mail order advertising comes in the mail. The rest of it runs in the form of small ads in The New Yorker or in women's magazines or the so-called "shelter books" (magazines with photographs of rooms full of red furniture).

 

If you order a product from one of these ads, your mailman is doomed. First, your shipment arrives accompanied by a catalogue. Second, since mail order advertisers swap lists, you get an avalanche of catalogues from others. They are the latter day mutations of the original Sears & Roebuck, Spiegel, and Montgomery Ward "wish-books." Then there were three. Now there are thousands.

The Personal Touch. Just as companies prefer to buy from other companies, people prefer to deal with other people; so the theory has arisen that the mail order customer will place more faith in a catalogue sent by another person than in one sent by an admitted company. This same theory once held currency in the cough-drop business (Remember the Smith Brothers, Trade and Mark?) and, before that, in patent medicines such as Dr. Pierce's Pleasant Pellets and Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. Personalized patent medicines have fared poorly since medical science eradicated catarrh, or at least changed its name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

But the Mom & Pop strategy lives on. I remember when Ambassador Leather Goods Company became "Joy Hall" and "Murray Hall", who signed the catalogue and put their pictures in it and seemed to be married. I guess they split up, because it stopped coming. Ironically, Mr. Roebuck lost his place of honor in the Sears Catalogue, but L.L. Bean, Norm Thompson, Eddie Bauer, and Harry and David took up the torch. See's candies always showed a picture of Mrs. See, the grandmotherly founding confectioner, and they still do; but now the letter on page two is signed by CEO Charles N. Huggins -- no apron, no spatula.

If not a person, then the mail order advertiser can claim to be a gallery, museum, collection, studio, bureau, buying service, liquidator, trading post, or monastery. Others – Signals, Solutions, Winter Silks, The Territory Ahead -- disdain all such categories and don't bother claiming to be people, companies, or anything else. They're just catalogues.

Bill-Stuffers. It may be that none of this will matter much longer as Amazon, E-Bay, and their imitators proliferate. But never underestimate the U. S. Mail, especially when the ranks of mail order giants have now been joined by oil companies and banks.
Their credit cards have given them gigantic lists of customers to whom they send monthly bills, now accompanied by colorful brochures (called "bill-stuffers" or, politely, "statement enclosures") offering zoom binoculars, digital cameras, wrench-sets, smoke detectors, Grandma Moses Christmas Plates, and simulated Icelandic sheepskin decorator rugs.

Industrial Direct Mail

Mail order advertising is fine if you're selling big & tall shirts, titanium-core golf balls, or thermal underwear or soliciting on behalf of endangered species or subscriptions to endangered magazines. In such cases, the advertiser is button-holing individual householders and proposing a small, simple purchase, easily handled: "Please check the coupon ..." Or, as the British say, "Please put your tic in the box." But if you were Alcoa, Nucor, or Bucyrus Erie, you would find it difficult to employ the same strategies:

"Please put your tic in the box if you wish to buy a bulldozer."

"Please send me _____ tons of 10-gauge high-strength, low-alloy steel sheet at $1280 a ton.

__ Visa __ MasterCard

Card # _________________ Exp. Date ______

Still, industrial advertisers are voracious users of direct mail because they make too many products to fit in their ads and because hardly anyone cares what they make anyway.
 

Coca Cola can afford to float a $45 million flight of ads and commercials to reach 200 million people, all of whom are potential customers. But if they were selling primary ore-crushers or backsizing latex instead of soda-pop, then they would have only a few dozen or a few hundred prospects, and they would just have to look them up, give them a call or play golf with them. If they were selling heat-resistant polyesters or drill pipe, there would be several thousand potential buyers -- too few for TV, too many for golf, but just a nice size list for a direct-mail piece offering free product literature and maybe a chance on a Lexus.

Mailers. The basic unit of industrial direct mail is the "mailer" or "mailing piece." This is often a simple card or folder with a reply card, but sometimes it's much fancier. To many art directors, a direct mail assignment is an invitation to an Origami festival, evoking spectacular folding circuses of multiple die-cuts, pop-ups, and wall-size scratch-and-sniff posters destined to win awards -- if not from the New York Art Directors' Show, then at least from a grateful paper company.

Littacher. Whoever sends in the reply card will receive "product literature" (pronounced littacher), usually a booklet or brochure. (The distinction between a brochure and a folder is highly theoretical, but generically speaking a brochure contains more product information, while a folder is more likely to have big headlines and a bird on it.)
 

Most manufacturers feel the need for a piece of literature to cover each product or group of products. Given that there are 10,000 kinds of steel, at least that many plastic resins, and comparable lineups in every product category from pipe fittings to duct-fans, the task of finding enough writers to do all these brochures is obviously impossible.
 

Fortunately, product literature does not have to be "written." It simply accrues, like a stalactite.

Someone in Sales, Marketing, or Advertising circulates a list of product benefits (such as, "superior wet-rub resistance") through the echelons of middle management. Each executive on the routing writes comments in the margins and attaches his favorite photographs of the product, the plant, or of higher executives. At some point, if for no other reason than to keep the office tidy, the whole accretion is bundled up and sent off to a printer.

This practice was begun during the New Deal because of its tremendous leverage in creating new jobs for those who might otherwise be unemployable. The mighty tide of product literature filling the nation's in-baskets and filing cabinets creates a vast, artificial demand for people who make in-baskets and filing cabinets, for people to build larger office buildings to hold these files, for photographers to take product pictures and camera-makers to equip the photographers, for paste-up artists, pressmen, postal workers, mail truck manufacturers (who, in turn, keep the steel mills and the tire plants humming), for typographers and the typesetting equipment makers who supply them, for filing clerks, file folder manufacturers, and the paper and forestry industries who supply both the file folder makers and the printers and who, in the process, keep engineer-constructors employed building paper plants and keep chainsaw and logging truck makers busy supplying their timbering operations -- and every one of these industries chips in by producing bales of their own product literature to refuel the cycle.

Forget the Internet. There are few things on this earth that have the economic reverberations of a colorfully illustrated brochure.
 

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