The Hoarding Gene and the Timeless Marketing Principle

Unfortunately I seem to have inherited my fathers “do-not-throw-anything-away-as-it-might-come-in-handy-in-the-future-gene” and so it was with a degree of trepidation that I started the task of clearing the garage over the weekend.

When we moved house 3 years ago, I was absolutely delighted that we’d, or rather I, would have a garage. Formerly we just had an 8 x 6 garden shed, so I believed that the vast expanse of my new 20 x 10 foot garage would offer ample space for my tools, lawn mower and sports equipment with possibly room even to park the car if we needed.

Well, three years later I’m faced with what would best be described as a hoarder’s grotto – and quite frankly I’d be lucky to be able to park one of my son’s toy cars.

Nevertheless, I was delighted when the first box I came across held the full course material and my precious notes from the +The IDM Diploma that I sat nearly 15 years ago.

While my days of handling large scale traditional direct mail campaigns are somewhat of a distant memory, there was so much sound and timeless marketing advice in that course that I couldn't help myself stopping to flick through my notes.

I was drawn to the “creative” folder and noticed my hand written scribbles all over the section that described how consumers engage with advertising, with the famous old acronym AIDA highlighted as The Key.

AIDA of course stands for:  Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

My notes referenced a seminar that I heard the fantastic @DraytonBird give that year. He said “sales letters or any DR Ad for that matter should always be written using that sequence. No exception. What’s more, it will never change, as long as the world keeps turning.”

I immediately thought of the new summer campaign we’d been working on at +Columbus Direct , with new London Underground tube car panels due to start running the following day. Had we forgotten these time-tested principles or would the ads stand up to the scrutiny of AIDA.

I’ll let you be the judge. Let me know if you think we've passed, failed or what we could have done better.

Oh, and the garage, well that IDM box was just far too interesting and after a good hour or so of reading I decided my dad’s genes were pretty comfortable and that the car was fine parked on the driveway anyway.