So in the last post, I talked about retailers lies and how they reverberate and why marketers should not lie....


And in response to one of the comments on the post, I said our responsibility as marketers is to go beyond telling the truth about products and services and to be honest about the way in which we communicate.
So this current post is the other shoe dropping, the confession, the session with my shrink. You see, what is sacred in direct response creative is getting the response. Nothing else counts. Most people who hire me to write copy for lead or customer acquisition do not care about relationship building; they want the phone to ring, traffic to their sites, lots of mail coming in.
The problem is that, in most cases, the only way to deliver what is sacred to the marketer is to deceive the consumer. In direct mail, what works best now to generate response are "Official" envelopes. We get consumers to believe they are receiving official and important documents with a variety of copy and graphics tricks. These include words and phrases like "Confirmation" with a serial number following; "Control Number" with a UPC; "APPROVAL GRANTED. Contingent upon Addressee Acknowledgement Prior to XX/XX/06"; envelopes imitating the format the IRS uses; and so on. In most cases, the envelope does not disclose who the mailer is.
The "official" deception continues inside the envelope, but generally only long enough to get the reader into copy about the actual product or service being promoted. Again, relatively few marketers apply deception to their products or their offers.
Now the interesting thing, and it's not a cop-out, is that, even in the "Age of Disbelief," consumers of all stripes and business people, too, are swallowing these deceptions time and time again. They're opening the envelopes (and emails by the way) and even though many are repelled by the deception, enough are responding to the promotion and buying from it. That doesn't make deception right; it just makes it very difficult to be a heretic and say, "No, I won't deceive for the sake of response."
As Alexander Pope said, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive." (Sorry, that was very deceptive of me. It sounds like it's Pope, but it's actually Sir Walter Scott.)