Method Marketing: How to make a fortune by getting inside the heads of your customers

In Method Marketing, Denny Hatch describes how eight multi-million dollar businesses were built by men who discovered the secret of getting inside the heads and under the skin of the customers — who thought how they thought, felt what they felt — and pounded home the seven key emotional drivers that change human behavior: flattery, fear, greed, anger, guilt, exclusivity and salvation.

Franciscan Priest Father Bruce Ritter, founder of Covenant House, developed a lean prose style reminiscent of the young Hemingway that told horrific stories of pedophilia and drugs on city streets and repeatedly touched the hearts and wallets of over a million donors who enabled him to build an $87 million-a-year empire of youth shelters and safe houses.

The priest's own proclivities for young boys nearly brought the entire enterprise crashing down, and the inside story of the death and resurrection of Covenant House has never before been told.

"Go for points of maximum anxiety," says Bill Bonner whose $80-million-a-year publishing business, Agora Inc., was entirely built on the genius of his direct mail copy. "Figure out what keeps your customer or prospect lying awake at four in the morning, then hit those hot buttons and promise salvation (or at least the hope of salvation)."
 
"People want things that are hard to find," cataloger John Peterman says. "Things that have romance, but a factual romance about them."

Peterman — who became famous as a character on Seinfeld — created the legendary J. Peterman catalog, a success entirely fueled by the marvelously quirky copy of a rotund, bearded and bespectacled New York wordsmith, Donald Staley.

Martin Edelston, built Boardroom into $125 million-a-year publishing operation with the help of only 80 employees (making it, perhaps, the most efficient business on the planet).

In Method Marketing, you will meet these five marketing geniuses "up close and personal," as well as see the actual copy that created their mega-million-dollar enterprises.

In addition, you will meet Curt Strohacker who turned a hobby into a business and David Oreck, arguably the most famous voice in America; their success can be attributed to their being totally in synch and in tune with their customers.

And, you will be stunned at the audacity of Bill Kennedy, a silver-tongued silver salesman whose ability to tap into human greed would have been a master stroke of brilliance except for the fact that his entire business was based on faulty arithmetic.

Finally, you will be tremendously amused at the audacity of the author, Denny Hatch, who had fool for a client when he defended himself at London's Royal Courts of Justice, Chancery Division, thus taking the concept of Method Marketing into another arena in another country.

Since 1976, Denny Hatch has been a consultant, copywriter and designer in the field of direct marketing.

In 1984, with his wife Peggy, he launched the newsletter, Who’s Mailing What!, which was based on a library of over 200,000 direct mail samples.

In 1992, his company was acquired by North American Publishing Co., in Philadelphia, where he is a regular columnist for Target Marketing magazine and editor of the e-newsletter, Denny Hatch’s Business Common Sense, published by the Target Marketing Group.

He is the author of:

Business Books — Million Dollar Mailings • Method Marketing • 2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success • priceline.com – A Layman’s Guide to Manipulating the Media

Novels — Cedarhurst Alley • The Fingered City • The Stork Memoir Jack Corbett, Mariner