This idea sits on my heart at least since the year of 2016, when I met Mr. Gerd Truntschka in Landshut/Bavaria. Mr. Truntschka is a former member of the German national ice-hockey team, and he played for a long time for the premier league teams of Cologne and Dusseldorf.

My Meeting With Mr. Gerd Truntschka

Mr. Truntschka and I spoke about direct response marketing and how this technique helps him to sell his product, the famous Lavita fruit & vegetable juice concentrate, to end consumers.

The Lavita business (www.lavita.de) is unique in many ways. Not only is it a family-owned business, the Lavita company produces its own products and sells it directly to end customers all over Germany, almost without any intermediaries, which I find noteworthy.

When we met at that Bavarian restaurant Hofreiter (click here), introduced by Mr. Thomas Forner, I had 1,000 questions for Mr. Truntschka about his ice-hockey career. That life-time memory goal that he scored when he least thought that the puck would go in. Mr. Truntschka also told me about his life and how he set up his company. This was a priceless evening. Thank you both, Gentlemen!

And what I will never forget is this allegory that Mr. Truntschka told me about Direct Response Marketing: imagine a forest with targets. It is too much work to go in and ask each and everyone whether or not he wants to buy your product, that does not work. Instead, put up a loudspeaker, shout into the forest, and wait who comes out. Only to these sell your product. That is so much easier, they have qualified themselves.

I will never forget this lesson. Thank you, Mr. Truntschka!

The Forest – Direct Response Marketing Explained In Simple Terms

Since I heard this parable, I have over and over told it to others, and I found it helpful to promote my ideas. This is why I recorded a lesson from it that I can pass on to my audience.

The set of slides can be found on SlideShare (click here) or you can download it here: The Forest – Direct Response Marketing introduction 010222

And the video is here:

 

Call-to-Action

Direct Response Marketing is not taught at universities. It is simply not hip, it is hard work for creative people.

But it works, so much is sure. And if it works for me it may also work for you.

Start reading about Direct Response Marketing today:
a) “The Autoresponder Mail Course” by Dr. Gary North (click here) which is based on the book “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins, and

b) Rosser Reeves, “Reality in Advertising” (click here for a book review)

 

Martin “Direct Response” Schweiger