However, this DM piece is nothing more than a catalogue which contains nice shots of the merchandise and some lovely kids and, of course, a price list. I would say the products featured are quite well-designed and elegant.
But the DM itself is simply boring, as is the case with the majority of DM pieces we receive in our lifetime. Ironically, the guidelines for doing 'effective' DM are far more creative and interesting than most DM pieces I've seen.
For example, this one: Q. How do prospects read a sales letter?
A. First they scan the page, from top to bottom, looking for highlighted words or phrases (headlines, subheads, capitalised words, underlined words, and so on). Each time they find highlighted copy, they stop ... for about 2/10ths of a second (called a fixation).
Sounds pretty scientific? But I can't figure out how they arrived at such an accurate figure of 2/10ths of a second? But does all this help in creating a DM piece that can capture the attention of consumers and sell them the product? Far more constructive to go back to some basic principles of advertising.
One of this is the ROI principle: relevance, originality and impact.
Otherwise, you'll end up developing a piece that will quickly find its way to the trash can.
