It’s funny. You can spend a career in DM, thinking you’ve seen every sector, then you get a puppy and bam - the pet industry hits you with everything it’s got. And boy is it good.
I spend half my time trying to convince clients that tone of voice, emotion and intelligent use of data are essential for effective copywriting.
Some believe me; others don’t. The naysayers should go and spend some time benchmarking with the pet industry.
Within a week of bringing our new dog home, we received flyers, direct mail and email from a handful of companies. Just look at these opening sentences:
Dear Mr Maslen, I have just received notification from your breeder that you are a new puppy owner.
Dear Puppy Owner, CONGRATULATIONS on welcoming your new puppy into your home!
Dear Puppy Owner, Congratulations on making one of life’s most rewarding commitments.
Congratulations on the exciting new addition to your family.
And my favourite, from Petplan:
Dear Mr Maslen, It’s so exciting when you welcome a new pet into your home, and I’m sure you and Merlin are enjoying getting to know each other better and better.
Petplan simply collect the owner’s name, the pet’s name and its gender, and from this data weave a compelling narrative that continues through upgrade offers, recommend a friend mailers and the policy document itself.
I spoke to Alison Andrew, head of marketing at Petplan. What, I asked, makes their DM work in a way the banks can’t manage?
"Everyone talks about passion, but we are customers of our own brand as well as marketers. So it’s very simple: we speak to our customers the way we’d like to be spoken to ourselves."
"If you go back to the Viking roots of the word ‘brand’ it means something that you would burn onto skin. Complicated brand maps and diagrams don’t do that. We keep it simple with our ethos - we’re Petplan, we’re about keeping pets healthy and owners happy."
It’s clear the relentless focus on a core brand message is what drives the quality of Petplan’s DM.
What’s more, they are entirely justified in using the word "exciting". Because getting a puppy IS exciting.
Unlike the slew of boring products this über-cliché usually gets manacled to, perhaps most commonly from the financial services industry. (I once coached a marketing executive from a pensions company who had written a headline that read, in full, Exciting pensions news.)
Here is a sector that makes the pets brigade look like astrophysicists.
At Sunfish, we have been banking with a certain high-street bank since we hung our shingle over the door in 1996. They know a lot about me. Yet they persist in sending me letters that begin "Dear Customer". How hard can it be?
They go on to explain, in patronising, boilerplate language, that they want to find out what matters to me. What matters to me is being treated as an individual after 14 years.
In contrast, the pet companies can gather data, then employ it with some personal, involving copy to make me relevant offers I want to respond to.
Take this sentence from Petplan: "At first glance, other policies seem to offer similar benefits – but will they cover Merlin for treating the same illness year after year?"
So, we’ll keep insuring the pooch with Petplan, but maybe this year we’ll go in search of a bank that actually does care about us, and not just our money. Don’t hold your breath.