Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

I’m not really sure who the winner is for wasted direct mail campaign effort this week. My favourites through the letter box this morning, and clear contenders, are:

Boden: A personalised letter with a £10 gift voucher to encourage me to use the catalogue they sent me a few weeks back. Sorry Boden, I haven’t received a catalogue from you, therefore your stream of restrictions and terms and conditions are of no relevance to me.

AA Insurance: A beautifully personalised letter inviting me to insure my car with the AA. The only real obvious blunder is that they are referring to a car that I sold nearly three years ago in August 2007.

I think my winner for the week is Boden.

Have you got any corking examples of poor, irrelevant or inaccurate direct mail? Please share.

I recently changed cars. More accurately: last month I changed car for the fourth time in 2 years. Each time this necessitated the usual faff of sorting the insurance.

I tried the online comparison sites, you know confused.com and the like. What a load of hassle. The best price was finally achieved by talking to a human being at A-Plan Insurance.

After this experience I also discovered that some major insurers don’t have their product listed on these price comparison sites. So are their adverts misleading?

Marketing Week have just published a fine article on this subject as well. See http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/item/56628