“Ugly works” in direct mail design, writes my colleague Denny Hatch in his latest column in Target Marketing (7\/08, p. 50).<\/p>\n
His premise: direct mail should be intentionally designed to look ugly and junky, because it will increase response. <\/p>\n
The reason (here Denny quotes his former boss Lew Smith): “Neatness rejects involvement. If a thing is too neat, a reader will look at it and say, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ and move on.”<\/p>\n
Old school DM experts have preached the “ugly direct mail design is best” rule for decades.<\/p>\n
But … I can’t help noticing that most of the winning direct mail promotions that cross my desk today are not<\/em> ugly. They are cleanly designed and easy to read — not at all “junky.”<\/p>\n So let me ask you, Gentle Reader: which school do you stand with?<\/p>\n Do you, like Denny, deliberately create direct mail packages that look crude, ugly, and cluttered — in the belief that “ugly works”?<\/p>\n Or do you find today’s direct mail prospects respond better to a more professional and sophisticated graphic approach?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Ugly works” in direct mail design, writes my colleague Denny Hatch in his latest column in Target Marketing (7\/08, p. 50). His premise: direct mail should be intentionally designed to look ugly and junky, because it will increase response. The reason (here Denny quotes his former boss Lew Smith): “Neatness rejects involvement. If a thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-direct-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}