Diorex

An interesting thing I have discovered across my career in marketing is that I am not my target market.

I am not the most eloquent or educated person around, but I feel I have ok communications skills and I have always considered myself a little bit above average, but by no means the smartest person in the room. Drunkest, yes. Smartest, No.

What never fails to shock me is that the stuff I make fun of and ridicule in the creation process almost always seems to be the best performing campaign.

As an example, a very long time ago, I had several teams of flyer hangers, who would put a flyer on people’s doors. I got paid per sale, but I was buying the flyer guys by the hour. If I did not watch closely, my flyers would end up in a dumpster and I got screwed, so I built into my business model team leaders who would police the other flyer guys and who got a bonus for each sale, but they had to buy the flyers from me. They made more money this way, but they shared the risk with me.

I had nice slick professional flyers, that looked great, but cost a pretty penny($.06 each in bulk). One day, I ran out of the nice flyers and called my team leaders to say we were not working that day. One of them asked if he could just run some flyers at the local copy shop and distribute them. He put together the ugliest flyer I had ever seen, it was Yellow and Black and Red with all kinds of blocked out lettering. It even had 2 words misspelled. well I did not want to discourage his entrepreneurial spirit, so I told him to correct the misspellings and we would see how he did.

I’ll be darned if that Ugly Yellow Flyer that cost 1/2 as much (without even ordering bulk) did not have almost double the conversion rate. I went from getting about 1.5 sales per thousand flyers to almost 3. I figured it was a fluke, but decided I would let the one team keep distributing them. The number stayed rock solid, well past a statistical significance.

To top it all off, my manager had not fixed the misspelled words. The flyer had 2 blatantly obvious misspellings.

Funniest thing of this whole long story…When I corrected the misspelled words, the conversion rate when down. So I put myself through College with a flyer with 2 misspelled words.

Moral of this story - Ugly Works.

Just the other day we were setting up an ad copy test with 10 different ads. One of my partners and I pointed at one version in particular that worked in 2 of the things we wanted to test but did so in really bad grammar and really was not as elegant as the others. We decided to throw it out, until I said “America might just be stupid enough to like this one.” So for giggles we threw it in the mix.

Anyone care to guess which ad copy blew all the others out of the water for both CTR as well as conversion? Try dumbing down your campaigns and enjoy the extra profits.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.