A mailing so bad it might work.
The other day the mailbox yielded the most innocently goofy direct mail package I’ve ever seen.
The Neptune Society wants me to pay for my cremation now, before I’m dead. How’d I get on the list? What does Neptune have to do with this? Maybe they expect me to drown.
The OE is wonderful. On the front: name and address, a stamp and a teaser: Free Pre-Paid Cremation! On the back: return address and clip art of Old Glory waving in the breeze. Free Pre-Paid Cremation is patriotic? Who knew?
Free Pre-Paid is an oxymoron, of course. Someone pays for it, or it’s free. Can’t be both. Besides, the word is Prepaid.
A careful read of the letter reveals no mention of anything free, certainly not a cremation, prepaid or otherwise. Something is free, namely information about the Neptune Society, but they don’t say that. They say NO obligation, which isn’t quite the same thing.
The letter is in italics, the whole letter. It starts off “Dear Michael” and I think if you’re going to talk to me about impending doom in Neptune’s realm, “Dear Mr. Lastname” might be more appropriate.
The letter is dated January 12, 2010 which is kind of cool except that when it goes out 3rd Class (now misleadingly called Standard) it arrives a couple of weeks later.
The letter copy is beyond goofy. What’s beyond goofy? Pluto?
The first sentence should be a grabber. It should rivet your attention. This one is 28 words of numbing irrelevance:
“For a variety of reasons, more and more people are choosing to plan for a memorialized cremation over traditional funeral arrangement – and the numbers are increasing every year!”
It’s 38 characters too long for Twitter for crying out loud. (39 if you count the missing s on arrangement.)
“A lot of people choose cremation over a traditional funeral,” says roughly the same thing and you could fit it twice into a Tweet with 20 characters left over so you might want to add “Who the hell cares?” Older people (Morituri te salutamus) don’t care what other people are doing, otherwise they’d be cooking meth, piercing body parts and wearing their hats sideways.
The letter proffers 4 reasons why “Cremation just makes sense…” Naturally none of them make any sense at all. The silliest is that cremation has less impact on the environment. Really? Sticking a body 6 feet under where it becomes one with the circle of life is worse environmentally than burning the same body, casket and all? This clean, green claim is the whole focus of the Neptune Society’s website, complete with a lady looking out at the ocean and the sound of waves and gulls in the background. It’s more likely to make you think of drowning, not getting cremated.
It goes on and on. The P.S. actually starts with “Sometimes death happens …”
I truly hope this works wonders for the Neptune Society. I’m sorry I can’t be a customer, though. I’ve asked to have my corpse dropped into the Everglades at night. It’ll be gone in a minute and the whole process will be clean, green and actually free. PETA will approve, too, unless I suddenly wake up and find myself wrestling ‘gators.
Michael, I think you completely missed the boat here! My uncle got the same mailing you did over a year ago. Last year he actually WON a Free cremation by mailing in the card that entered him in the contest. A Neptune representative visited with him to put his arrangement in place. Thank goodness he did because when he died last month, my aunt told the hospital that he won a free cremation from Neptune Society. When the hospital called, Neptune picked up my uncle then made all arrangements with the national cemetery and honor guards for my uncle. It went beautifully and my aunt could not have been more relieved. In fact, she put her arrangements in place too to make it easier for me when she goes.
It sounds to me like you’re too caught up criticizing the mailing, instead of understanding the value of what you received. All I have left to say is if you don’t enter the contest, you’ll never win!