The idea behind much of this section is that the tendency to sit in the centre ground when writing to people is not a good idea.

The central ground notion comes from two sources.  One is our feeling that if we stray out to the edges we might upset someone.  The other is the feeling that, if we don't know a person's thoughts or situation, we can't make assumptions because we could go wrong - so let's stay in the middle, with the majority..

Upsetting - or at least annoying - people is something I know a bit about, because many of the slightly humourous, or off-the-wall pieces I write do annoy some readers.   For every 20,000 or so  sales letters from Hamilton House that I send out and which many people find funny, I get one vitriolic letter of complaint, usually along the lines of "don't you realise that no one thinks this is funny," and "do you ever imagine that someone will actually buy from you as a result of this?".   (Actually some of these complaints get quite obscene - so they can be a bit upsetting even to a hardened hack like me).

But the fact is that when I pull back and just write a regular run of the mill piece, although the one in 20,000 complaints stop, the sales go down.   I return to the humour and sales go up.

Over the years I have particularly gone over the edge with the tales from the Toppled Bollard - a mythical pub where the intelligentsia of the marketing industry meet, get drunk and fight each other.  Having been doing this for so long my firm now gets several calls a week where the caller says, "I've been reading your Toppled Bollard stories for years, but have used xxxx because they are cheaper than your company.   But now as sales have been declining, I thought I had to give you a try, because..."   Obviously I would have liked them to come to us sooner, but the cumulative impact of being different has clearly won the day.  The cumulative effect of a set of middle of the road sales letters is very little.  No one remembers them.

To me, the simplest trick to learn in direct mail is, move out of the middle ground.   You can do it by being funny, by being highly personal, by making assumptions about your reader (which you know are only going to be right for a small number)... you can do it in all sorts of ways.  But you really do need to do it.

The question is however, how does this fit with the theory.  If the majority of people are in the middle ground, how can we get better sales from the fringes?    I believe the answer to this comes from a deeper understanding of where people's attitudes now stand, as was revealed by the theories of Maslow - and this is dealt with in the section on the Hierarchy of Needs.

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This article is written by Tony Attwood, Chairman of Hamilton House Mailings Ltd.  If you would like to discuss the writing or design of your mailing campaign, or indeed a single mailshot, with Tony, without cost or obligation, just call 01536 399 000, or email Creative@hamilton-house.com   You can also send Tony a copy of your latest advert and he will call you back with his thoughts on how your response rate could be raised - again without cost or obligation.