Denny Hatch

Denny Hatch is the author of six books on marketing and four novels, and is a direct marketing writer, designer and consultant. His latest book is “Write Everything Right!” Visit him at dennyhatch.com.

✂ Cut this out and tape it somewhere for easy reference. 1. Fear 2. Guilt 3. Flattery 4. Exclusivity 5. Greed 6. Anger 7. Salvation Reread the headline and deck of this article. They combine to use five of the Seven Copy Drivers (see the list above), which are a simple set of motivators. Ignore them at your own peril. If you write, edit or review copy for your catalog, tape this list to the wall next to your desk for easy reference. Refer to this list every time you work on your catalog’s copy. Now let’s take another look at the headline. What

Richard V. Benson, consultant and author of “Secrets of Successful Direct Mail” 1. Lists are the most important ingredient to the success of any promotional mailing. C. Rose Harper, first woman to serve as chairperson of the Direct Marketing Association, Direct Marketing Hall of Fame inductee, and former president of The Kleid Co. 2. Direct marketing companies don’t have a single mailing list — they have many. How many? Only segmentation will tell. Your opportunities to segment a customer file into marketing units when purchasing behavioral characteristics are vast. Thus, while the marketing Information network (mIn; www.minokc.com) offers more than 42,000

It should have such incredible perceived value that your visitors want to bookmark it By Denny Hatch When I travel, I like to bring my laptop so I can check e-mail and read English-language newspapers online. To do that, of course, I need the right phone jack for the country I'm visiting. Recently I went to Spain. Before I left, I visited the Web site for the Magellan's catalog, clicked on "Info Center," scrolled down the country guides list to Spain and found that Spanish telephones are accessible with the RJ-11 adapter used in the United States. Terrific! No order needed from

By Denny Hatch I am a late-night talk-radio junkie. I have this little pillow speaker, and when I wake up during the night, I turn on the radio and hope the talk will lull me back to sleep. From midnight until 2 a.m. Rollye James, a woman with a brilliant intellect and an encyclopedic knowledge of rock-n-roll music, is on the radio. Then from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. is Coast-to-Coast AM with George Norry who replaced Art Bell, one of the great Renaissance minds of the 20th/21st centuries. What these talk wizards have in common is a sponsor called C. Crane

Focus On: Merchandising & Creative The year was 1943. World War II was raging across Europe. Norway was occupied by Germany. The Nazis needed access to open ocean and the deep-water fjords to shelter their great ships. Next door, Sweden remained neutral and relatively untouched by the conflict. In the town of Elmtaryd, Sweden, in the parish of Agunnaryd, an ambitious 17-year-old boy named Ingvar Kamprad traveled from farm to farm selling seeds from a box on the back of his bicycle. He had other items to sell—fountain pens, pencils and matches—but couldn’t inventory them all on a bicycle. So he hit on

I am a sucker for perfection—those things in life that cannot be improved upon. Examples include toothpicks, McDonald’s french fries, the Boeing 747, Avery labels, a Bombay Sapphire martini, Fred Astaire movies, Rubbermaid® products and business-to-business (b-to-b) catalogs that don’t waste my time. The catalogs from Consolidated Plastics are good examples of the latter. The Twinsburg, OH-based company produces four b-to-b catalogs: Plastics; Rubbermaid Commercial Products (right); Bags, Packaging and Shipping Supplies; and Commercial Mats and Matting. My favorite is the Rubbermaid book, which features bright colors, terse but perfect copy, absolute ease of navigation and no-hassle ordering. The cover

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