Method Marketing: How to Make a Fortune by Getting Inside the Heads of Your Customers

Introduces eight marketing geniuses who built multi-million dollar businesses and examines their marketing practices, techniques, mistakes, and triumphs

How Great Copy Built 5 Multi-Million-Dollar Businesses
METHOD MARKETING:How to Make a Fortune by GettingInside the Heads of Your Customers In Method Marketing, to be published in March 1999 by Bonus Books, Denny Hatch describes how eight multi-million dollar businesses were built by men who discovered the secret of getting inside the heads and under the skin of the customers‹who thought how they thought, felt what they felt‹and pounded home the seven key emotional drivers that change human behavior: flattery, fear, greed, anger, guilt, exclusivity and salvation. Franciscan Priest Father Bruce Ritter, founder of Covenant House, developed a lean prose style reminiscent of the young Hemingway that told horrific stories of pedophilia and drugs on city streets and repeatedly touched the hearts and wallets of over a million donors who enabled him to build an $87 million-a-year empire of youth shelters and safe houses. Fr. Ritter¹s copy drivers: guilt, guilt and more guilt. The priest¹s own proclivities for young boys nearly brought the entire enterprise crashing down; but after a nasty internal fight, Covenant House was ultimately saved through brilliant public relations and, once again, powerful direct mail copy. The inside story of the death and resurrection of Covenant House‹with all the brilliant copy, charges and counter charges‹has never before been told. "Go for points of maximum anxiety," says Bill Bonner whose $80-million-a-year publishing business, Agora Inc., was entirely built on the genius of his direct mail copy. ³Figure out what keeps your customer or prospect lying awake at four in the morning, then hit those hot buttons and promise salvation (or at least the hope of salvation).² Bonner¹s emotional copy drivers: fear, greed and, of course, salvation. ³People want things that are hard to find,² cataloger John Peterman says. ³Things that have romance, but a factual romance about them.² Peterman‹who became famous as a character on Seinfeld and whose first real job was playing baseball for a Pittsburgh Pirates farm team‹created the legendary J. Peterman catalog, a success entirely fueled by the marvelously quirky copy of a rotund, bearded and bespectacled New York wordsmith, Donald Staley, whose prose is as colorful and evocative as anything found in The New Yorker or Best Short Stories of the Year. Staley¹s secret hot buttons: flattery, exclusivity and salvation. Martin Edelston, built Boardroom into $125 million-a-year newsletter publishing operation with the help of only 80 employees (making it, perhaps, the most efficientorganization in the world). The secret of his success: a chronically-ill, intuitive copywriter named Mel Martin who invented a technique he called ³Fascinations²‹a series of endless teasers that played on every one of the copy drivers: fear, greed, guilt, anger, flattery, exclusivity and salvation. Bob Shnayerson, who described himself as ³a congenital, deep-dyed Irish pessimist,² was approached by a backer to start a magazine, Quest/77. He wrote the publishing plan, but none of the great direct mail copywriters could articulate the premise with enough passion to bring in subscribers profitably. So Shnayerson wrote his own letter‹based on anger and salvation‹and brought in 600,000 paying customers. Shnayerson¹s manifesto could apply to any new business or any new chief executive taking over an existing organization: I believe if you¹re gong to be the editor of a new magazine, you‹the editor‹must try to write your own direct mail letter, even if you¹re a terrible writer. You have to think through what this magazine is... what the benefits are to the subscribe... and then write a a 4- or 6-page letter with all the passion and intensity of your last will and testament, as though it were going to be carved in stone and signed with your blood. Even though this letter may never be mailed, you will have created a document that your circulation copywriters.... your advertising promotion people... and your editors can work form. It¹s an absolutely essential step in any magazine start-up. In Method Marketing, you will meet these five marketing geniuses ³up close and personal,² as well as see the actual copy that created their mega-million-dollar enterprises. In addition, you will meet Curt Strohacker who turned a hobby into a business and David Oreck, arguably the most famous voice in America; their success can be attributed to their being totally in synch and in tune with their customers. And, you will be stunned at the audacity of Bill Kennedy, a silver-tongued silver salesman whose ability to tap into human greed would have been a master stroke of brilliance except for the fact that his entire business was based on faulty arithmetic. Finally, you will be tremendously amused at the audacity of the author, Denny Hatch, who had fool for a client when he defended himself at London¹s Royal Courts of Justice, Chancery Division, thus taking the concept of Method Marketing into another arena in another country. Denny Hatch is a freelance direct mail copywriter, designer and consultant. In 1984 with his wife Peggy, he founded Who¹s Mailing What!, the only publication that covers the entire range American direct mail for direct mailers. Over the past 15 years, he has read and analyzed more than a 500,000 direct mail packages in over 200 categories: consumer, business, non-profit and catalogs. In 1992, his company was acquired by North American Publishing in Philadelphia where, in addition to editing the newsletter, he became editor of Target Marketing magazine. The author of three published novels, Denny has also written Million Dollar Mailing$, published by Bonus Books/Precept Press and 2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success, co-authored with Don Jackson, published in 1997 by NTC Contemporary Books.‹30‹