The more we have invested in something in the past, the more we value it, no matter what. Thus if we buy a piece of equipment that is poor in quality the urge is not to throw it out, we try to get it working again, even if this costs us more and more money and all logic says, throw it away.

We do the same in our personal lives – we stay with a bad relationship in the hope it will get better, we keep reading a bad book in the hope it goes somewhere, and if we have bought a TV that is not up to much we stay with it rather than jettison it and start again. In other words we don’t want to admit any sort of error.

All of which can make it difficult to get people to change their minds when they have invested heavily in one system or one approach. Although, as we often try to show, using “grabby images” next to text can greatly reduce sales in direct mail, many advertisers are reluctant to try the experiment of not having illustrations in emails or postal direct mail because of sunk cost theory.

To admit now that an image at the top of the email or on the covering page of the postal promotion does not work challenges everything they have done in the past, and emotionally they can’t find a way to do that.

If you do want people to set aside old investments you really do have to focus on the validity of the new, perhaps allowing that in the past what the person chose to do was indeed the right response, but that now, in this new era a new approach is right.

In this way the individual can feel good about the past, and although this does not fully overcome sunk cost it does help the reader make one step forwards.

For a long time, postal mail worked a treat. Then it sank under its own weight, and negative feelings about junk mail. Email was king, but then email sank under a mountain of spam. Now postal direct mail is flavour of the month and response rates are higher than ever.

If you would like to know more about email and postal marketing, please do call 01536 399 000.

Source: Hal Arkes Catherine Blumer Ohio State University

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