Max Sackheim was a creative thinker who invented several successful advertising concepts in direct response advertising history. Two of his best-known marketing...View More
concepts are the "Book-of-the-Month Club" and the "Negative Option Plan." The "Book-of-the-Month Club" was derived from Little Leather Library, developed by Sackheim and his partner Harry Scherman in 1914. They offered a set of 30 imitation leather-bound books at a price of $2.98 by mail. In the headline of an ad, it said "SEND NO MONEY! " They sold 40 million books by mail in 3 years. In 1926, they formed Book-of-the-Month Club to sell books on a subscription basis. However, the business was not doing very well in its infancy as many books were returned or canceled. They decided to change the plan and created the "negative option plan". Subscribers were notified in advance about the next book, giving them a detailed description of it and allowing them two weeks to reply. If subscribers did not tell them "No" within two weeks, they would presume that subscribers were saying "Yes" and sent out the book. This idea has built many mail-order companies into multimillion enterprises such as the Columbia House Record Club featured here: http://swiped.co/url/adfnh
