#190 Disbelief

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2023/06/198-disbelief.html

 

 

#190 BLOG POST  - Thursday 22 June 2023

 

Posted by Denny Hatch

 

 

Part I:

The Secret of Successful Direct Marketing:

Create a “Willing Suspension of Disbelief.”

 

The Introduction of the Up-up-up Market
American Express Platinum Card.

 

Above is a tacky, crappy reproduction of the most exciting, exquisite mailing I ever received in studying more than 100,000 pieces of junk mail over the 30-year life span of my cranky newsletter, WHO’S MAILING WHAT! It was the staggeringly beautiful launch package of the revolutionary American Express Platinum Card in 1984.

 

Our estimated cost to produce this mailing — paper, printing, inserting and postage was roughly $1.00 each in the mail. (A mind-blowing $2.93 in today’s dollars!)

 

Shortly I will share with you the amazing specs of this extraordinary marketing effort — a personal “me-to-you” First Class Postage offer signed in blue ink with the actual signature of AmEx’s top panjandrum, Consumer Card Group President Edwin Cooperman.

 

 

About the “Willing Suspension of Disbelief.”

“Two basic tenets of selling are that (1) people buy from other people more happily than from faceless corporations, and that (2) in the marketplace as in theater, there is indeed a factor at work called “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

      “Who stands behind our pancakes?  Aunt Jemima. Our angel food cake? Betty Crocker. Our coffee? Juan Valdez.  Anyone over the age of three knows that it’s all myth. But — like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy — the myths are comforting.”

—Bill Jayme, Legendary Direct Mail Copywriter in a letter to DH.

 

“Direct response marketing is not advertising in an envelope.”

— Bob Hacker, Founder & CEO of The Hacker Group.

 

OSE — Outside Envelope — for the Platinum Card mailing. Highest quality paper, printing, personalization, simplicity and elegance. Embossed silver faux platinum card at upper left. Two actual U.S.P.S. 18¢ postage stamps affixed at right. No crass teaser copy. It has the look and feel of an actual letter.

Simple Order Card. Dark band across the order card top was a raised strip of silver metallic faux platinum (also atop each of the three pages of the letter).  No pain-in-the-neck B.S. of interrupting the ordering process by requiring the applicant to hunt up a credit card account number. The mailing was sent to AmEx cardmembers only, and obviously Ed Cooperman's computers knew them by name and address.

The letter was a masterpiece of copy and design. "A letter should look and feel like a letter," said guru Dick Benson.

The signature on page 3 was in blue ink. "Always use the writer's actual signature, and not a neat-'n'-tidy phony computer font," said the great copywriter Malcolm Decker. "The signature is your salesman's handshake."

 

From the moment it was retrieved from your mailbox, and you started reading the three-page personalized, hand-typed letter with faux platinum top edges on the gorgeous heavy stationary and reply card, there was no question in your mind that you were being individually contacted and treated as true worthy by a high panjandrum at American Express. Sure, it was all done by machinery, but it had the look and feel of a personal invitation sent direct to you from his office. It was flattering as hell!

 

My great friend Bill Farley, VP of a leading bank in Minneapolis, sent me his mailing as a sample with this gleeful note: “I was accepted for membership!”

 

 

My 1986 Write-up in WHO’S MAILING WHAT!

Technical Talk

If we had to pick the splashiest solo mailing to go out in six-figure numbers over the past two years, the American Express Platinum Card effort would win hands down (540AMEXC01186NYDX). It travels in a closed-face 7-3/4" x 4-5/8" envelope of exquisite Artimus Text paper with platinum embossing and 1/8" platinum edge on the envelope flap. Inside is a 3-page personalized letter on matching paper with a tiny reproduction of the card embossed in metallic faux platinum on the letterhead and a metallic platinum edge at the top of page 1. The second and third sheets have the platinum edge only. There is a matching BRE (Postage-paid business reply envelope). The Acceptance Form is on slightly heavier stock. A beautiful 4” x 7¾" 16-page 4-color brochure spel1s out benefits. Interestingly, the only place the price of the card is mentioned is page 3 of the letter.

 

Why is this mailing so splashy? Quite simply because it is a rare example of direct mail technical perfection -- from a mailer willing to pay for that perfection.

 

The Diablo Printer: Automatic Typewriter with a Daisy Wheel

It is produced by ABS in Wichita, KS, an organization that has 155 Xerox Corp. Diablo printers and over 200 people who match and insert all the components by hand. Most clients send "tape, text and art" and ABS takes the job through completion -- always guaranteeing to meet the deadlines that have been contracted for. For virtually all clients ABS chooses paper and envelopes and produces mailings in which the outer envelope, order form and page 1 of the letter are personalized. Additional pages of the letter are offset and collated along with any brochures and the BRE.

 

For the Platinum Card effort here is the drill: American Express ships into ABS a load of single sheets of Artimus Text paper. Consumer Card Group President Edwin Cooperman's signature is pre-printed in blue on those sheets to be used for page 3. 

 

“Always use the writer's real signature on the letter,” said copy wizard Malcolm Decker. “It's your salesman’s handshake.”

 

Outside carrier envelopes and order forms are on matching paper and in matching type. Each element is completely typed on the same Diablo printer so there is an exact match -- outer envelope, page 1 of the letter and the order form. Because American Express is insistent on the illusion (a.k.a. creating a willing suspension of disbelief) that the entire letter be an exact match, pages 2 and 3 of the letter are also typed on that same Diablo printer, even though there is no personalization! The mailing goes out Presorted First Class with two live 18-cent U.S. postage stamps affixed to the outer envelope. (Did Cooperman’s secretary actually lick the stamps???)

 

Only American Express knows the actual cost because they are supplying paper and brochures. But an educated guess would be somewhere between $1,000.00 - $1,010.00/M. That’s with no outside list rental, because the mailing goes only to Amex cardmembers.

 

Is the mailing successful? It's been mailed for over two years. There are currently a quarter-million Platinum Card members paying $250 a year ($732 in 2023 dollars). The product being sold is a little plastic card, so cost of goods sold is peanuts. That’s virtually pure profit of for a cool $62.5 million a year ($183 million in today’s dollars) in dues alone. To get these kinds of numbers response would have to be well into two figures.

 

Most of the ABS clients (Sotheby's, Porsche. Learning International, Value Line) have units of sale in excess of $75. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is using a personalized effort whose average unit of sale is a paltry $17; according to Dolores McDonagh at the National Trust, the ABS package pulls up to 20% better, with the increased response making up for higher costs.

 

 

                              A Quick Aside on “Memberships”
Legendary magazine marketing guru Dick Benson extolled the benefits of having members rather than ordinary subscribers. He said, “Magazines linked to membership affiliations — like the National Geographic and the Smithsonian — renew better than plain subscriptions by 10% or more.”

 

The Platinum Card & Why I Acquired One.

For starters, I had close family ties to American Express. In 1950 my father, Alden Hatch, was hired to write the official history of the company, American Express: A Century of Service. Our house on Long Island bordered the second fairway of the Rockaway Hunt club (founded 1878). In my boyhood AmEx president Ralph T. Reed, his wife Edna and daughter Phyllis vacationed in a suite overlooking the Hunt Club golf course. They were constant visitors at the house. In 1956 I got a summer job in the mail room of American Express. And very early in my career when I was book traveler (salesman) flying around the country I acquired an American Express Green Card and, shortly thereafter, a gold card.

 

Artwork on my current Gold Card
showing my membership since 1964.

 

Why Would I — A Pipsqueak Newsletter Publisher

With a So-so Middle Income — Spring for Platinum?

Yes, $250 a year annual dues, ($732.50 in 2023 dollars) were exorbitant. However, in those days Peggy and I flew a lot. The Platinum Card guaranteed access to several of the deluxe airline lounges. More important, we did some serious traveling (Egypt, Africa, Belize) and Platinum membership included comprehensive Travel Insurance guaranteeing private evacuation out of the jungle to the nearest top hospital and flights back to Stamford, CT if the worst befell us.

 

Takeaways to Consider

• Everything about this extraordinary mailing screams top-of-the-line service and customer delight. (NOT the usual plain old lawyer-written “Customer Satisfaction Guaranteed” line.)

 

• The mailing package was highest quality and promised highest quality.

 

• With email marketing an ordinary little 52-character subject line looks like every other 52-character subject line amid the dreary dozens of subject lines in your computer inbox.

 

• In short, the Platinum Card mailing was tactile and immediately stood out among the bills and junk mail as something extra special and certainly worth pursuing.

 

• It immediately overcame disbelief.

 

• God how I miss the fun of direct mail marketing—the writing, designing and producing direct mail packages (including renewals and billing efforts) — and above all going into the mail room for the tactile thrill of finding huge Post Office canvas bags stuffed with orders!

 

•  A couple of decades ago, I interviewed Joan Manley, Time-Life Books CEO who turned the publishing company into a behemoth. She confessed to me that several times a year she simply had to get onto a plane and fly to Chicago to get in physical touch with her customers. That meant visiting the huge mail facility where orders were received and processed. Unlike the retail business — where sellers are always face-to-face with customers — Manley felt a deep personal need to see… and touch... and open… and read original incoming mail orders. “This is as physically close to my customers as is possible in the mail order business, and I need to do it!”

 

• Today, the overwhelming percentage of orders are electronic blips untouched by human hands. The result: direct marketers don’t have any sense of actual human contact.

 

• Alas…

 

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