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Elephants In Your Mailbox How I Learned the Secrets of Mail-Order Marketing Despite Having Made 25 Horrendous Mistakes
Enjoy the autobiographies of outstanding leaders in every field of business, skillfully condensedon two cassettes so you can take them anywhere. Hearing their words is like a personal visit as they reveal what their priceless experience has taught them. ELEPHANTS IN YOUR MAILBOX - ROGER HORCHOW
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
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October 27, 2021
I gotta be honest - I really loved this book.
I didn't buy this book on purpose, it sort of fell into my hands by chance. I never would have known who Roger Horchow was or had the idea to learn about catalog marketing otherwise. This book is 40 years old and discusses a form of marketing from half a century ago, something that's now a tiny niche barely hanging on. Forget the internet - this book was written when the recent adoption of CREDIT CARDS was having a big effect on business.
I didn't know a thing about the Horchow Collection before this, but the way he described it through his excellent writing makes me feel like I could picture the company firsthand. Of course, I'm always wary about CEOs writing puff pieces about their own companies (that Starbucks book comes to mind, blech), but Horchow was smart to make the book about his *mistakes* and show more than a healthy dose of humbleness and humility. This was the exact right approach to take, and incidentally makes the book much more useful, too.
It was both amusing and fascinating to read about the challenges and solutions Horchow faced, and how they mirrored current issues with online retailing today. Customer personas, shipping delays, issues with supply chains... of course he wasn't the first to deal with these things in marketing, but one gets the sense that a great deal of ecommerce learnings could have been skipped over if more digital folks had read books like this.
His predictions for the future were great too - video phone ordering, television shopping networks, the biggest bottleneck continuing to be delivery services - I gotta say, he really nailed it. Through the book I definitely came to admire the man a little. I looked him up, just to see if he was still alive, what he was doing in life, and had the best discovery of all. In the next few years after this book, after becoming a successful business owner, he sold the company and used the money to live out his real dreams, and went on to produce award-winning Gershwin musicals for the rest of his life. In fact, that's what he's known for now, and all this important advertising stuff is just a footnote. I found that to be really inspiring and I'm happy the guy got to do his thing.
I think people might look at me funny when I recommend they read a book about catalog marketing in the 2020s but I am definitely going to recommend this book to everyone.
I put a longer summary more focused around the things I actually *learned* from this book over on AdCavern.
I didn't buy this book on purpose, it sort of fell into my hands by chance. I never would have known who Roger Horchow was or had the idea to learn about catalog marketing otherwise. This book is 40 years old and discusses a form of marketing from half a century ago, something that's now a tiny niche barely hanging on. Forget the internet - this book was written when the recent adoption of CREDIT CARDS was having a big effect on business.
I didn't know a thing about the Horchow Collection before this, but the way he described it through his excellent writing makes me feel like I could picture the company firsthand. Of course, I'm always wary about CEOs writing puff pieces about their own companies (that Starbucks book comes to mind, blech), but Horchow was smart to make the book about his *mistakes* and show more than a healthy dose of humbleness and humility. This was the exact right approach to take, and incidentally makes the book much more useful, too.
It was both amusing and fascinating to read about the challenges and solutions Horchow faced, and how they mirrored current issues with online retailing today. Customer personas, shipping delays, issues with supply chains... of course he wasn't the first to deal with these things in marketing, but one gets the sense that a great deal of ecommerce learnings could have been skipped over if more digital folks had read books like this.
His predictions for the future were great too - video phone ordering, television shopping networks, the biggest bottleneck continuing to be delivery services - I gotta say, he really nailed it. Through the book I definitely came to admire the man a little. I looked him up, just to see if he was still alive, what he was doing in life, and had the best discovery of all. In the next few years after this book, after becoming a successful business owner, he sold the company and used the money to live out his real dreams, and went on to produce award-winning Gershwin musicals for the rest of his life. In fact, that's what he's known for now, and all this important advertising stuff is just a footnote. I found that to be really inspiring and I'm happy the guy got to do his thing.
I think people might look at me funny when I recommend they read a book about catalog marketing in the 2020s but I am definitely going to recommend this book to everyone.
I put a longer summary more focused around the things I actually *learned* from this book over on AdCavern.
Displaying 1 of 1 review