It’s always good to have a chat with Jim Lewcock, chief executive of The Insert House and The Specialist Works.

In fact, if you missed it at the time, I recommend reading this very excellent interview with him.

I was talking to him the other day for an article about envelopes. As usual Jim managed to share some pearls of wisdom during the exchange, and I thought I’d pass them on.

He told me about a client who’d been considering giving up on the use of inserts altogether, because they just weren’t getting the required response.

The Very Big Advertising Agency dealing with said client had advised them to make their insert format as cheap as possible, and to place them as cheaply as possible. Result: even less ROI.

Enter Jim and his dynamic team of print and insert champions, who said: “Why don’t you do the opposite? We recommend you double the cost of the print and find a more targeted audience.”

Duly persuaded, the client did just that, and indeed the new format involved an envelope. The response increased six-fold “making the extra cost irrelevant,” Jim reports.

Love this! It’s another great example of the “what do you want to achieve” conversation versus a discourse that’s just about buying ‘x’ number of leaflets as cheaply as possible.

I am reminded of a past example involving Andy Bailey at Inc Direct, who had a client who started off wanting on-trend stuff involving apps and Facebook pages, but whose aims were actually better served by using a really good piece of direct mail.

It seems to me that the key to success is to really know your stuff, and be confident enough to push back against what a client might initially think they need – especially if that’s just a cheaper version of something that’s not working as well as it could.

Why not be a bit more Lewcock about it?