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

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

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Direct marketing agencies are now the tap-dancing, pony-tailed brethren of their general agency masters. Lester Wunderman used to say "They will become us." Alas, we have become them, including Wunderman's formerly great agency, which last year, appallingly, even lost its name, having been rechristened "Impiric," a word that sounds vaguely like a diarrhea remedy.

As of June 2001, the name "Wunderman" was about to be restored, with "Impiric" banished into the netherworld of ideas too stupid even to contemplate. I would estimate that the two name changes will end up costing about $10 million, not even including the enormous expense of agency executives wasting countless hours, days, and weeks bickering about this idiocy. And how will the born-again "Wunderman" which is owned by Young & Rubicam, which is owned by WPP, recover this money? From their clients, of course.

E-COMMERCE: a way of buying things remotely that on its best days approximates the convenience of simply calling a telephone number and ordering something.

Seriously, folks, I do almost all my buying on the Internet. For one thing, I'd rather put needles in my eyes than go to a shopping mall. But at its best, e-Commerce is quite a wonderful thing. Take Amazon.com, for example: whether they survive or not may be questionable, but they're terrific to do business with.

ENCRYPTION: the science of keeping secret codes secret, unless you're dealing with hackers.

ENVELOPE: the outer envelope is perhaps the most critical part of a direct mail package, because it's the first thing people look at. It's also the only part of a direct mail package where behavior is predictable: People first look at their names and addresses, and then turn the envelope over to open it.

One can talk for hours about the outer envelope, and in fact I have done so, which, come to think of it, makes me question my sanity and sense of values. But, briefly:

· You can make the envelope blank, you can use mysterious teaser copy, or you can be explicit. Blank envelopes work occasionally, but not for long, unless you're going to current customers and using your logo. Teaser copy works with high-involvement categories and publications. Explicit copy works best for mass, low-involvement categories such as financial services and telecoms, particularly if the environment is highly promotional.

· Put the window on the left and place copy right above the window. Reasons: Anything on the left engages the brain's right hemisphere faster, speeding comprehension, which should be an objective of all marketing communications. The eye unconsciously goes right to the name (see PERSONALIZATION), and because we read from top down, will pick up some of the copy.

· Use the back of the envelope. It usually won't cost you anything additional, and remember, it's the second thing people look at. But echo the copy from the front. New ideas can slow down the semi-automatic process of opening the envelope.

There you are! Solid, bread and butter stuff, with nary a trace of cynicism. But read on…

FOCUS GROUPS: an unlikely answer "Yes" to the question "Can voyeurism be boring?" A way to waste time, eat, and make demeaning remarks about people, all at the same time. An intellectually egregious survival of a long discredited kind of pseudo-scientific positivism. A way to shift responsibility when it comes to new product development and advertising concepts.

If focus groups worked, new products wouldn't fail.

HEADLINE: the ticket on the meat, David Ogilvy once said. General advertising print advertising in the U.S. is so weak as to be laughable. The agencies hate it, and give it to the kids and burnt-outs, while the stars go off and do TV. Because they're written by people who either don't care or don't know, print ad headlines have little to do with product, benefit, and selling, things that are fundamental to sound marketing.

Guidelines for headlines:

· There must be a benefit.
· You must not end it with a period or full stop, since you would like people to read further, and the full stop is a literal stop sign.
· Long headlines get better readership and recall than short headlines. This is counter-intuitive until you think about it. You need a fairly long headline to state a benefit.

INTERNET:

1) The most important communications technology in the history of the world.
2) An overhyped bubble.
3) That which changes everything.
4) That which changes nothing.
5) Of extreme philosophical and even metaphysical significance.
6) Just another channel.
7) All of the above.
8) Some of the above.
9) None of the above.

JUNK MAIL: direct mail. The term "junk mail" sends direct marketers into fits of self-righteous defensiveness, but that's what people call it. The exception: When a person responds to a direct mail package, the process is curiously invisible. It's not "I responded to a junk mail package." It's "I bought something I wanted on Tuesday." That's why direct mail buyers, in all sincerity, will deny purchasing via direct mail.

"Junk mail" has now expanded into "junk calls" and of course "junk e-mail."

I once knew an old direct marketer who would turn scarlet at the mere mention of what he called "the J-word." I, of course, merrily junk-mailed him every time we met. For some reason he stopped inviting me to his parties.

LEADS: Leads and lead-generating activities are a whole black art unto themselves. Lead- generating programs are commonly used to produce inquiries for salespeople, particularly in business-to-business firms and investment companies.

The iron rule of lead generating: You cannot have both quantity and quality. You have to trade off one against the other, which you do through manipulating the offer. Successful lead-generating programs revolve entirely around the offer, in fact, which you can cleverly and carefully calibrate, if you know what you're doing

1) Maximum quantity, minimum quality: Offer a free, valuable gift that's unrelated to the product. This can be good for a new or young sales force, who will inevitably waste leads, and whose enthusiasm will carry them through useless conversations with non-prospects.
2) Maximum quality, minimum quantity: A non-offer, in effect, e.g., "Call 1-800-123-4567 to speak to a Sales Consultant." What comes in will convert nicely into sales, but not much will come in.
3) Best of possible worlds: Offer an informational "booklet" (not "brochure," which is more commercial) promising disinterested information. Example: "7 Answers to Common Questions about Website Design…and 5 Ways XYZ Corporation Can Help!"

Sales forces are funny. I spent much of my early career generating inquiries for salespeople, and became convinced that the average sales organization has a denser body of superstition than any recently discovered tribe in the Amazon jungles.

I was working for an investment company, and the brokers loved leads generated by Wall Street Journal ads. The conversion rate was about 20%. But they hated leads generated by direct mail to Journal subscribers. The conversion rate was about 4%.

The extreme drop-off in results didn't make sense, since all of these leads were coming from the same source. So I tried an experiment. I began disguising direct mail leads as newspaper leads and guess what! The direct mail conversion rate began climbing until it reached 17%, much more in sync with what should have been happening.

Here was the problem: There was a myth in the sales force that no lead generated by direct mail could be converted, period. The myth originated several years earlier when one of my predecessors used some bad lists that were horribly unproductive. As a result, the salespeople were putting the Wall Street Journal direct mail leads in their desk drawers, never following up, and faking their reports ("Not at home…Not interested…Dead…"etc.)

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