“No need to be clever. Just relevant.” — Drayton Bird
Seven words. And they take away an enormous amount of pressure.
I keep a copy of Drayton Bird’s How to Write Sales Letters That Sell on my shelf. It is a second edition, published in 2002, and it focuses primarily on direct mail; the physical letter, the envelope, the stamp. Much of what surrounds it in the book has moved on: the media landscape it was written for looks quite different from the one we operate in today. But Drayton’s principles have not moved an inch. They sit on the page as freshly as they did when he first articulated them, because they are not principles about media. They are principles about human beings.
Who Drayton Bird is #
Before taking his advice, it is worth understanding the weight behind it.
In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton Bird one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing. He founded the UK’s largest direct marketing agency, sold it to Ogilvy and Mather, and went on to serve as international Vice-Chairman and Creative Director, helping O&M Direct become the world’s largest direct marketing agency network. He has worked with American Express, British Airways, Microsoft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Visa, among dozens of other major brands. David Ogilvy; himself one of the most celebrated figures in advertising history, said of him: “Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone else in the world.”
His book Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982 and has been published in 17 languages. When someone with that body of work distils his thinking into four words: “no need to be clever, just relevant”, those four words are worth considering very carefully.
What relevance means #
Drayton’s core argument is deceptively simple. Any communication that talks to the right person about the right subject at the right time, and appeals to that person’s self-interest, will succeed. It does not have to be clever to do so. If it is also ingenious, it might succeed even more but that touch of originality is far less important than being relevant to the reader. What usually works best is not ingenuity but news of benefits.
That last phrase; news of benefits, is the practical expression of relevance. The reader is not interested in your product or service in the abstract. They are interested in what your product or service will do for them, specifically, in their current situation. The moment your communication speaks to that, the relevance switch trips. The reader stops scanning and starts reading.
The challenge is that most marketing communication gets this backwards. It leads with what the writer wants to say rather than what the reader needs to hear. It describes the product before it describes the problem. It showcases capability before it demonstrates understanding. The result is communication that is technically correct and entirely irrelevant, which is the most common way for a good product to go unnoticed.
Media differ. Principles don’t. #
Bird’s second key observation is one I return to whenever a new platform or format appears and everyone starts asking whether the old rules still apply.
“Media differ. Principles don’t. No matter what you write: letters, emails, ads, landing pages, TV commercials, you need the same skills and must follow the same principles.”
This is as true now as it was in 2002, and it will be as true in 2032. The rise of social media, the emergence of content marketing, the growth of LinkedIn as a B2B communication channel, the arrival of AI-assisted writing, none of these change the underlying dynamic between communicator and reader. The reader still has limited time and attention. They still apply a rapid relevance filter to everything that arrives in their field of view. They still want to know what’s in it for them before they commit to reading further.
The medium shapes the format, the length, the tone, and the timing. It does not change what the human being on the other end of the communication is looking for. That remains constant across every platform that has ever existed and every one that will.
Lester Wunderman’s question #
This is where a question from another giant of direct marketing sharpens the whole argument into something almost uncomfortably precise.
Lester Wunderman; widely credited as the father of direct marketing and the man who coined the term itself, defined the challenge of all marketing communication with a single question: “To whom are you offering what ultimate benefit?”
Eight words. Three components. And if you cannot answer each one specifically, you are not yet ready to write your message.
To whom, not “business owners” or “SMEs” or “decision-makers.” A specific person, in a specific situation, with a specific set of concerns and priorities.
What, not a list of features or capabilities. A single, clear, definable thing you are offering.
Ultimate benefit, not the immediate benefit of the product itself, but the deeper outcome the reader wants. Not “an email marketing service” but “more clients without cold calling.” Not “a data cleansing programme” but “a contact list that actually works.”
The question forces clarity. And clarity, as Bird would say, is relevance made visible.
The pressure it removes #
“No need to be clever. Just relevant.”
I said at the start that this takes away an enormous amount of pressure and it does, but only if you understand what it is asking of you. It is not asking you to be lazy. It is not asking you to produce uninspired, functional communication that ticks the boxes without earning the reader’s attention.
It is asking you to redirect your energy. Away from the search for the clever turn of phrase, the unexpected metaphor, the ingenious hook and toward the patient, sometimes difficult work of genuinely understanding the person you are writing to and what they need to hear.
That work; understanding before writing, listening before communicating, is harder than being clever. It requires you to know your reader well enough to speak to their situation specifically rather than their category generally. It requires you to ask Wunderman’s question and sit with it until you have a real answer rather than a plausible one.
The result, when you get it right, is communication that feels effortless to the reader. Not because it required no effort to produce, but because all the effort went into the right place.
Thank you for reading
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
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