Back in November, Cushman's Fruit Company was selling 24 of its legendary HoneyBells in a quintessential, full-page mail-order ad that appeared in PARADE magazine.
This was direct marketing at its classic best. Just how classic you ask? First of all, the written words alone had incredible stopping power, beginning with a headline in the form of a curious question: “What the devil is this? Then Ed bit into one and the plot thickened.”
What followed was an extraordinarily interesting, cleverly written story about Ed Cushman and the origin “of the strangest looking, fiery-orange, bell-shaped oranges anyone had ever seen.”
In addition to such original, copywriting craftsmanship, what really helped this ad stand out was its compelling positioning of HoneyBells as “available once and only once each year.” Overall, this Cushman's ad goes a long way toward leveraging the law of supply and demand, not to mention a number of old-school DM principles that can still carry a lot of weight in today's new-media world.
Larson note: Act now or it is gone. Those words still work but if you use them you have to mean them. You can’t have a last chance sale every other week. When I was learning the art of advertising and direct marketing, before anything else we had to learn the rules. Yes, there are rules in this creasy business. Once you knew and understood the rules and were able to apply them to perfection maybe, just maybe on rare occasion could you break the rules but even then you hard to validate was to why you were breaking the rules. But as shown above there is a reason why classic ideas rule the marketplace. Don’t mess with success!
Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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*Source: Haymarket
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1 comment:
Unfortunately people tend to carry out activities in business that work... and then stop doing it!
Timely reminder to remember to do those things that need doing, and get back to covering the core basics in business well.
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