If you had to sum up just one rule of successful financial direct mail marketing, this would be a candidate:
“[People] walk around with their umbilical cords in hand, looking for a place to plug them in.”
As a copywriter and marketer, I always try to stay mindful of this, but the truth is, I’m as susceptible to this reality as anyone else.
There’s an old adage that salesmen are easy to sell to and since copywriters are salesmen in print, many of us spend a small fortune being persuaded.
Perhaps, you’re familiar with the above quotation via a well known marketing guru, who attributes the line to “a friend.”
I’m certain he found this memorable morsel in psychiatrist/trader, Alexander Elder’s book: Trading for A Living.
This direct mail package for Phillips Publishing’s Invest With the Masters is a perfect example of the umbilical cord concept. The reasoning goes, “I may not be as smart as Warren Buffett, John Templeton or Peter Lynch… but I am smart enough to follow what they’re investing in.
It’s a simple premise: you don’t have to be an investment genius to make money like one.
This magalog dates from a golden age of financial direct mail in the mid 1990s — before the hockey stick growth of the Internet.
It also mailed exactly five years before the implosion of financial direct mail in 2001 when 9/11, the anthrax attacks and postal rate hikes combined to knock a lot of smaller players out of the game.
Now You Can Harness The Moneymaking Power of the World’s Most Successful Investors… (19-page PDF, 5.2 mg) is still a terrific piece fifteen years after it mailed.
Dan Kennedy always attributed that umbilical cord quote to Cavett Robert.
Thanx for the excellent swipes.
@Dave_C: I thought that WAS a Cavett Robert quote. And I’ve never heard DK mention it.
Cavett Robert was the greatest speaker this country has ever known. And I can guarantee that that line was so good he did use it many times in his talks. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak three times during my 45-year career as a CMP. The man was brilliant. Just reading the words doesn’t provide anything meaningful, but when Cavett Robert said it (just about everything he said was a keeper), it was pure joy. I miss the man.