The Rule of Lists

To select good lists, you must know your audience as well as you know your mother, brother or boss.

In the theater of your mind, you should be able to see and hear your customer living, breathing—and making buying decisions—right in front of you. Say you’re thinking of renting the Lillian Vernon list. Can you visualize that customer picking up the Lillian Vernon catalog, turning the pages, becoming interested, buying? You can probably visualize your mother that well … and I’ll bet you can predict your mother’s response to the Lillian Vernon catalog with reasonable accuracy. If you understood your own catalog’s audience as well as you understand your close relatives, you’d be able to predict their buying behavior quite well. That’s why understanding your audience is so important to making the Rule of Lists work for you.