Earth to Marketers: Don't Act Like We're Stupid!

Respect your prospect’s intelligence! It’s one of the points I make repeatedly in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First–and with good reason. To succeed in business, you need long-term relationships. And you don’t get them by insulting people.

I could list bad-practice examples from now until the end of time. Every once in a while, I find one that just pisses me off because it seems to shout, “Hey, Stupid! Send us money!” The one that landed in my postal mailbox today was one of them.

It was a plain, typed envelope–with a sprayed barcode and a nonprofit bulkrate stamp. No return address.Yeah, I opened it–after all, Google’s AdSense checks can’t be identified from the outside.

Inside, a post-it with this text in a very UNconvincing handwriting font:

Shel,
have you
seen this?
Brian

Yes, three lines of text all lined up, and the name about under the question mark.

The sticky note was attached to (and amazingly precisely lined up with) a piece of newsprint. The front had an ad for a charity I’ve heard of but don’t contribute to. The back was a fake news story about the same charity.

No clue about who Brian might be, except that the fake article mentions the CEO’s first name happens to be Brian.

So just how stupid does this charity think I am? Am I supposed to be fooled into thinking this is from someone I actually know? That despite the bulk stamp and barcode, I was individually selected? Does a “news story” with no byline, no identifier about the paper it might have ran in? Or that the article and the ad just happened to be back-to-back and fit perfectly with no wasted space? Puh-leeze! Stopping only to be humiliated in this blog post, this mailing goes straight to the recycle bin.

Why, after all these years, do marketers continue to write, design, and distribute this crap? Do they really think we’re going to be fooled? Do they actually want dumb-as-a-slug contributors or customers who won’t ask embarrassing questions?