The Toppled Bollard

Actually, sorry, that headline is wrong.  You don’t.  You get a free emailing to teachers, a free extra mailing and a free listing on the School Procurement Website for a year.

These things are all free, gratis, complimentary, on the house.  But the house has no food.  Not a crumb.  Not a sausage.  Not a bean.  Sorry.

However some of the teachers who get your shared mail leaflet also get an email from you.  These emails go direct to the teachers who have opted into this service – which means not all of them get it (but the real whizzo teaching enthusiasts do get it).   No charge.  Not a cent.  Zero.  Nothing.  Nil.  Nought.  Square root of minus two.

Then another set of your leaflets (up to 10% of the original number booked) are mailed out to teachers at no charge.  Not a penny.  Totally without cost in any form.

Finally details of your product or service are included for a year on the School Procurement Website, complete with links to your email and your own web address.  And here disbursement = 0.  It’s free.  You don’t pay.  Not today, not ever.

If we add to all this the unique fact that our shared mailings carry a cover page from the School of Educational Administration to the administrator, you’ll get the picture that our shared mailings are, well unique.  Inimitable.  Incomparable.  Matchless.  Peerless.  Without equal.

But, I hear you asking (although not literally you appreciate) do shared mailings work?   A good question and one I am asked often.  Regularly.  Frequently.

The fact is that HHM has, over the years, used shared mailings to sell tens of thousands of our own products to schools.   We’ve learned what makes one item sell and another one flop – and we are more than excited (champing at the bit you might say) at the prospect of you phoning up and asking us to have a look at your leaflet and comment on how a few minor changes might make it work all the better.  (That bit is free too).  We really are getting quite energised by it all.  Quite worked up.

Tony Attwood

PS: If you have received letters from me in the past you’ll know that I used to sign off with a silly phrase such as “no horseman will call”.   As an attention seeking ploy it worked, but endlessly seeking attention is rather unbecoming.  So I don’t do it no more.  Not never.  Ever.  Well, only on Tuesdays when there’s no dancing.     Call me on 01536 399 000 if you want any of this to be unravelled.

Common sense suggests that you can’t advertise one thing by advertising something quite different, and yet that is what we have done for years with the Toppled Bollard stories.  This one was headed “Advertising Holidays in Cornwall”.  As usual the journey is somewhat surreal, but the end takes us to the real start.

Here’s the piece…

It is rare that a day passes on which I am not asked by a member of the marketing fraternity to write an advertisement for one or other of our esteemed local tourist organisations.  Of course I turn down most such demands – one can spread one’s talents too thinly after all – but occasionally a plea catches my eye, pulls at my heart-strings and I accede to the request.

Such was the case when I was asked by the Cornish Tourist Bureau to boost visitor numbers with a few well-chosen words.   Having spent many a happy holiday in our most southerly county, I agreed and repaired at once to my local hostelry in order to undertake the necessary research for this project.  

Research is, in my view, the key to all successful advertisement writing, and in this regard my fellow imbibers did not fail me.  Opinion in the Toppled Bollard was clear: Penzance is known both for having the highest murder rate in Britain and for its wonderful food. 

According to my colleagues these two characteristics of the local populace often combine and it is not uncommon for Penzantine chefs to be stabbed in the kitchen for making a small error of judgement over a local recipe.  This seemed a good starting point for an advert, the sort of local colour that today’s intrepid explorers love, and I noted it with glee.  

Talk then moved on to the issue of the Cornish vendetta.  These normally start as simple local disputes, as for example in February this year when the favoured ox of Prince Gwennap – a local ruler – disappeared one dark and stormy night.   Five weeks later the death toll was 1,900, Helston and Falmouth were depopulated, the local bovine supply had dried up, and chefs were forced to turn to halibut – with limited success and the subsequent demise of many of those working in the hotel and catering industry.  

I was also told that the men involved in such disputations refuse to shave until honour is re-established while the women nail up the blood stained shirts of their victims on the outer walls of their homes as trophies.   With such local colour I felt the advert worked well.  

Tony Attwood  

PS:   For some reason one or two local folk have since expressed disquiet about my campaign, claiming I have confused Cornwall with Corsica .   It was thus while resident for several jolly weeks in “Black Snithy”, Helston’s magnificently preserved Victorian prison, that I wrote the enclosed “Four Point Plan”.  It contains in summary everything I know about raising response rates when selling into schools.  I hope you find it helpful.

Many years ago I wanted to ensure that everyone who was a potential customer of Hamilton House Mailings plc, at least knew about us, and thought nice things about us, even if they were not our clients. 

Of course most of these people would not be our customers - we were not looking to get 50% of the direct marketing market.  But I wanted a situation that would mean that when they were thinking about changing suppliers, our name would come to mind in a positive light.

The route that I chose was both simple and unique.   I decided to write a sales letter laced with humour to all our potential customers.   I did it, and on the day it hit I started to get a really good response.

Clearly the idea worked.   People liked the idea of a funny story as a sales letter.   But what about the follow up?

I tried a couple of different pieces over the next six weeks, and then an idea hit me on the nose.  If I treated my sales letter as part of a on-going story, I could not only keep the humour running month after month.  It would make the writing easier, and it would bring a continuity to the whole idea.

So I decided to set the stories in a public house.   Seeking a name for the establishment, I asked myself what distinguished our part of the country, from anywhere else?  What would our mythical local pub be called that reflected our town?  

Driving home that night I realised the answer.   On any one day, most of the Keep-Left signs in the middle of the streets of Corby are knocked over, having been hit by trucks, cars and (mostly) over-excited pedestrians.  So I called the pub The Toppled Bollard.

Now, years later, I constantly get phone calls, which run along lines like this.   “I’m not a customer of yours, but I’ve been reading your Toppled Bollard stories for years.  Very funny.  Anyway, I wanted to talk about doing a mailing to…”

And I say to them, “Look, this is junk mail you are talking about.  You are supposed to say, ‘You are destroying the rain forests.  Stop sending it to me.  Where did you get my name from anyway?’   But you are not saying that.  You are telling me the name of a pub that I made up and put in a sales letter.   It’s not even in the headline but you know it!  Do you mean that you have actually been reading all this?”

 And they laugh and admit that yes, they have.  And they have remembered.  And they know what Hamilton House Mailings is, and I confess that the Toppled Bollard is a myth, and I can’t take them out there for a pint, but there is a very nice restaurant just down the hill in the People’s Independent Republic of Rutland, if they’d like to visit.

And we have a jolly chuckle, and then settle down to business.

(Of course it is not always like this.  About once every six months I get an anonymous letter telling me that I know nothing about direct mail, and “do I really think anyone would ever buy anything as a result of *** like this?”   I quite enjoy those, mostly because they are anonymous.   There’s something about people who write anonymous letters that appeal to me…)

Since then I have helped a number of companies follow this route (the Toppled route, not the anonymous letter route), finding them a local issue to write about and a series of characters whose stories they can tell.

It works and it is fun.   So I thought I would go back and revisit some of the odd moments of the Bollard from years gone by.   And maybe talk a bit about which stories worked and which one didn’t.  And why.

There’s plenty of post-modern irony in this tale.   You’ll enjoy it.

I’ve just got to nip down the hill for a quick one, and then I’ll be back telling the full story of the Bollard and all who pass by her door.  “Don’t touch that dial” (as they used to say).

Meanwhile if you would like to converse with me on topics Bollardic, or come to that, anything else, give me a buzz.  01536 399 000 usually works.  I always enjoy a chat.

While taking my regular afternoon brain restoring power-tea of champagne and coconut muffins at the Toppled Bollard last week I was thrilled to cast eyes on my old chum and celebrated Bolshevik Syd Braithwaite-Cynchronize-Swymme 

Syd’s translation of the poetry of Laura Riding into Old Norse remains to this day one of the masterpieces of the genre, and it was as a direct result that he earned his position as Scrabble Correspondent of the Daily Prod.   He is however even more famous for his work with the “Friends of Fate” – a group of itinerant web bloggers who were the first into Dorking after its liberation last Thursday.  

The “Friends” – with their distinctive uniform of bright yellow blazer, green yachting cap, white jeans and perfectly shined shoes – famously made a triumphal entrance ahead of a division of Royal Navy Engineers who had taken a wrong turn on the M23. 

The locals responded with wild delight, waving buckets and projecting paper aeroplanes emblazoned with their email addresses on the side. 

In recent years Syd has spent much of his life on Salisbury Plain undertaking experiments in time travel on behalf of the Ministry for Transport.  “In the Ministry,” he told me as we settled down to an afternoon’s light repast, “we have five divisions.   Big signs, medium sized signs, little signs, traffic lights and counter-terrorism. 

“The Minister’s view is that if you want to bring Britain to a stop you simply disrupt our highways.  Within three days there will be no petrol at the pumps and no booze in the supermarkets.   This will lead to widespread civil unrest and the end of etiquette as we know it.”   

As part of his work to stop this eventuality Syd is employed undercover as a front of house manager for the Palais de Jive in Woking, where he keeps an eye on the notorious “End of the Wedge” gang, known for rotating the sign posts and distributing copies of “The Complete Hooligan” – a pamphlet that advocates the hunting to extinction of all Ministry staff on the grounds that they are collectively  responsible for the failure of our railways and chaos on the M25.     

Syd has also worked as War Correspondent of Exchange and Mart, spending much time on the south coast, where he is known as the only man who can wear a beret north of the 50th parallel without a sense of post-modernist irony. 

On the other hand if you want to know anything about direct marketing, do call 01536 399 000.   We’re awfully nice people.

Welcome to the World of the Toppled Bollard - a place beyond time and space, stuck between dimensions, and just below the eiderdown.

It is the secret world nerve centre of direct marketing - and you can find out more about what it really does by calling 01536 399 000.

Or not.  As the case may be.

Tony Attwood.  

Director, Dept of Certain Things.