Boron - Chapter 18

Here is a true story. Once upon a time I wrote a letter to
sell a product I dreamed up which was a family name research
report. This little report would give you a short history of
your family name and it contained a black and white drawing
of the earliest known coat-of-arms (family crest) ever to be
associated with your name.

As you are aware, this became one of the most successful
sales letters in history. In fact, this simple one page
361-word letter generated more than seven million (actually
7,156,000) cash with order customers.

Not bad, eh? But listen to what happened next! Obviously, we
wanted to sell these research report buyers other products
and the logical course of action was to send them a catalog
showing a bunch of products they could get that would
display (in full heraldic colors!) their family crest.

Sound good to you? It sounded great to me. So, what I
did is I went off on a camping trip by myself and there, all
alone in the woods, I created a 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 four color
catalog which featured about 70 attractive items that could
be ordered personalized with my customer's family crest.

It bombed.

It didn't even return our mailing costs! So, what next?
Well, at that point, what I did is I took the 3 best selling
items in the catalog and I put together an 8-1/2 x 11
brochure that featured only 3 items.