JRosenfield Article

JIM ROSENFIELD'S "DEVIL'S DICTIONARY OF MARKETING"

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CONSUMER: an automaton, a puppet, a machine, to be researched, managed, controlled, exploited, probed, prodded, analyzed, manipulated, raped, pillaged, harvested.

CONTINUITY PROGRAMS: one of the great discoveries of direct marketing, so great, in fact, that at least 1,000 different people take credit for inventing it! It's the Book-of-the Month-Club concept: Sign up customers by luring them via huge discounts, then send them monthly items they have to send back if they don't want.

This is called the "negative option." It exploits human inertia, not something that will get you to Heaven, but not necessarily the worst thing in the world of business.
Columbia House, one of the great continuity marketers, has shifted in recent years to "positive option," which is certainly a nicer (but perhaps less profitable) way of doing business.

I once had a meeting with the President of a big continuity program, and I remarked on the lack of an 800-number in any of the company's communications. The President gave me a wily look: You of course want to make it difficult for customers to reach you if you're running a negative-option outfit. So much for the importance of dialogue!

COPYWRITING: almost a lost art, certainly a lost art in general advertising, which revolves around images, not words. There's still some great direct mail copywriting going on, enough occasionally to warm the heart.

Great direct mail letters, particularly in the publications area, have generated some of the best commercial prose of the post-war era, at the very least comparable to Bill Bernbach's work in general print advertising. One shuffles respectfully before such giants as the recently deceased Bill Jayme, and remembers with awe the late Frank Johnson, and my friends Chris Stagg and Hank Burnett, both of whom left us far before their time.

Some years back, I approached the Direct Marketing Association with an idea for creating a video history of direct marketing. I wanted to get the older generation on tape before they started to depart to the other side. The DMA dickered around, folks started to die, and alas, the project was never started. Would that the DMA had some regard for the heritage of direct marketing, rather than spending its time trying to convince consumers that privacy invasion is good for them.

COUPON:

1) A mode by which the packaged goods industry in the U.S. has moved products off shelves, while destroying their brand equity at the same time. Brand equity, so the hypothesis goes, facilitates charging a higher than commodity price. Couponing then brings the price down to a commodity level. Something's wrong here, probably with brand theory, and certainly with corporate organization, where the advertising people and product managers are often not on the same page, and almost never in the same building.

2) The part of a print ad that asks for the order. The traditional coupon, to be clipped and mailed, may be on its last legs, replaced by 800-numbers and websites, but the guidelines remain the same:

· Keep it at the lower right corner of the ad, or all the way across the bottom of a small ad.
· Restate the offer.
· Retain the standard dotted line look. Do not disguise the coupon as a baseball, a person, a hammer, a dog, a cat, a seal, or a penguin. If it doesn't look like a coupon, the brain and the eye won't get the right message. The coupon is the property of the marketer, not the Art Director, and any Art Director who goes near it should have his ponytail pulled.

CRM: Customer Relationship Management or Customer Relationship Marketing. You see it both ways. It's the buzzword du jour, replacing "relationship marketing" and even edging into the territory of "database marketing."

When you see any of it, please let me know.

CROSS-SELLING: used primarily in the financial services industry, where it's been a holy grail since the 1970s, based on the not illogical principle that current customers are the best prospects for new products and services. Mail order companies have thrived on this principle from the beginning of time, but financial companies have as yet failed to cross-sell successfully.

Why? Well, lots of them are lousy marketers. Technology is a common deterrent, with (for example) the credit card customers and the retail bank customers in different databases. But also, people hate their banks. Why on earth would I buy something additional from Bank of America, which (this is a fact) has treated me egregiously over the last few years?

CUSTOMER: a consumer unlucky enough to do business with us.

CUSTOMER CARE: a new-age term for "customer service." No one cares, unfortunately, about customers or customer care.

CUSTOMER SERVICE: something that doesn't exist.

DATABASE MARKETING: the computerized use of customer information to enhance marketing efforts.

Database marketing is real, and it can work. It's also overhyped, and usually more expensive than it need be, due to predatory vendors and ignorant clients.

Here's what I have learned:

· Purchase behavior is the most important information.
· Recency, frequency, and amount of purchase remain, as they've always been, the most important predictors in most categories, with recency almost always the most vital of the three.
· Actual (not inferred) demographics and psychographics are most helpful, although hard to get.
· If database marketing is 80% effective, that's usually good enough. The cost of achieving 100% effectiveness can seldom be justified. And no one's ever come close to that level anyway.
· Never let corporate Information Technology people get involved in a marketing database. They'll buy new computers, using your money, and write their own software, costing you your job.
· If you think you're in danger of violating customers' privacy, you are. Don't do whatever you were planning to do.

DATA MINING: a high-tech method of dumpster diving. If you're bad at it, it will cost you lots of money. If you're good at it, it will get you into trouble for invading people's privacy.

Why do it? Beats hell out of me.

DIRECT MAIL: usually (but not always) the core direct marketing medium. Also the most difficult and maddening of media, because it involves a production process. Where other media end, direct mail begins. Anyone who can execute a large direct mail program flawlessly should get a medal.

Also, and more familiarly, called "junk mail," a phrase that sets direct marketers' teeth on edge. You can have a lot of fun with this at direct marketing conferences.

DIRECT MARKETING: advertising that tries to generate behavior, keeps track of that behavior, and then tries to generate other, mostly similar behaviors in the future.

Direct marketing is for the brave, those who are willing to be measured. General advertising agencies avoid this sort of thing like the plague. Unfortunately, so do direct marketing agencies, in these benighted early days of the new millennium, preferring fuzzy things such as "relationship building" and "CRM" to actual measurements of real returns on investment.

Another difference between direct marketing and general advertising is the style of prevarication. Most advertising stretches the truth or even lies. Direct marketing communications tend to lie in a very direct way, general advertising communications in a very indirect way. The latter is much more insidious, making direct mail the moral superior of general advertising. Of course, this is a very, very relative kind of morality.

DIRECT MARKETING AGENCIES: direct marketers have always been vaguely ashamed of their craft. It is indeed unglamorous, depending to such an extent on direct mail as its core medium. The shame, unfortunately, has now greatly compromised the performance of once-great direct marketing agencies.

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