There are almost as many direct response marketers who are against using negative appeals and copy as there are who are against using humor....

It wasn't always that way. In the 70s and 80s, you'd see a pretty fair number of headlines/envelope teasers/Johnson boxes with lines like:

- "Don't be a victim of…"
- "Stop paying through the nose for…"
- "Is your career over at age 45?"
- “What you don’t know could kill you” (actually from a 2006 mailer sent by Sanofi Aventis)

The best-selling book in those days had a negative title – How to Avoid Probate. There was a theory that it sold millions of copies because people thought that “probate” meant conception.

Essentially, a negative approach involves posing a problem for the prospect and then solving it via the product/service. A positive approach suppresses the problem and starts with the solution.

What should you do? It's my theory that MOST of the people who respond to direct marketing efforts are optimists – they truly believe that whatever they buy holds the potential of making their personal or business lives better. Advertising to them must be upbeat, without negatives.

However, you may be missing part of your market. First, many optimists are not going to understand that the need your product/service viscerally until they feel the pain. A negative approach can do that. Second, pessimists may respond to direct marketing efforts as well. To get them to respond, you have to show them that you buy into their gloom and doom scenarios. They may respond just to validate that nothing can solve their problems.

In print, you have no way of knowing whether the ad is being read by an optimist or pessimist, so you alternate and monitor results. In direct mail, with attitudinal segmentation available, you can mail the positive approach to optimists; the doom-and-gloom approach to pessimists.