Monday 9 March 2009

Most of Your Marketing is Junk

Most of the mail that you send is junk mail. Most of the mail that you receive is junk mail, in that you don't want it and it's not personal to your needs but it has your name on it.

Most of the direct mail that you put into envelopes and send out as postcards is also junk, in that it's not relevant or personal to the recipient.

So should we all give up using that horrid direct mail as a marketing technique?

No!!!

I was listening to the great Drayton Bird discussing this recently. Drayton is probably the smartest and most experienced minds in UK marketing. Drayton's view is that the majority of most things is junk.

The majority of TV is junk, but we call that Trash TV, the majority of literature is junk, we call that pulp fiction, the majority of the weather in the UK is junk, we call it British weather. Most of the media is .... Most email you receive is junk, but we call it spam. Thank all those techiess for inventing spam filters. The majority of the football I see is junk, is that because I support Blackpool?

Then, just because this stuff comes through your door with your name on it and you have to bend down and open the thing we give it a special more odious title. Because we have to act as own spam filters and bin the stuff we don't want we give it the pantomime villain name of Junk.

Now, you don't normally have Seth Godin and Drayton Bird agreeing but on this they do, junk is junk, trash is trash and pulp is pulp. You are wasting your time and money and not impressing the reader.

Find a more relevant way to communicate.

Be more relevant.

Think what does your prospect want? It's probably not another piece of mail or email from you.

You have probably had enough of me.

Was this blog junk?

4 comments:

Kunocreative said...

Wouldn't it be nice if all marketing was permission-based? I guess maybe TIVO is the answer in TV land, but who has the time to program the TIVO? E-mail should just go away entirely, but it will stay with us like a nasty fungus forever. Our only salvation is print media marketing - it's just too expensive, so eventually it will dry up and leave us alone. We can only hope.

L Paez said...

If all marketing was permission-based, I would have probably never heard of the Sham-wow! I would regret that type of existence. A more suitable question is- How would I find the next "sham-wow", without entertaining late night infomercial kings?

Anonymous said...

Junk mail and email spam is unwanted because it is mostly created by people who don't market properly. Because it is so easy to produce it is deemed as rubbish. If we had to pay for emails then spam would be reduced dramatically, and if paper was more heavily taxed then junk mail would also decrease. Businesses would be forced to think more carefully about their marketing campaigns with a proper focus rather than churning out any old crap in the hope of gaining a sale.

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