JRosenfield Article

"What's New and Different?" He Asked

James R. Rosenfield

October 2004

The full page ad features a photo of a pleasant looking young fellow. The headline reads "With 75 Million Choices, There Is A Select for Every Need."

The body copy proclaims that "Any direct marketing company can tell you that Carl is a sports enthusiast living in Trenton , New Jersey .

"What they can't tell you is that he is a 33-year-old teacher born on September 28, 1970; married and living in a rented condominium with a household income of 110,000, has a dog and takes a passion in golf."

And direct marketers are shocked that people dislike and distrust them! If muckraking Op-Ed columnists really wanted to do a number on direct marketing, they could simply quote from ads in trade publications.

Are we not the most egregiously obtuse and insensitive gang of blockheads on the face of the earth? For a company to shout that it knows your age, occupation, birth date, marital status, homeownership status, income, pet ownership, and hobbies is to send chills down the spine of anyone in possession of a functioning brain cell.

Of course all of this is a lie. The company in question has aggregated information based on neighborhood, but possesses little ability to disaggregate the data. The U.S. direct marketing community for years now has shot itself in the foot by making grandiose data claims that bear scant resemblance to reality, yet get people and politicians all stirred up.

I was reflecting on this when a friend of mine called. He was about to be interviewed for a job with a direct/interactive agency, and he wanted to know what's new and different.

Well, let's see:

--Everyone still seems as dumb as ever when it comes to privacy (see above).

--Email marketing should have taken over the world right now, or at least the direct mail world. With the single (and signal, to be sure) exception of tactile involvement, it can accomplish anything that direct mail can, at a fraction of the cost. In fact, a few years back, gurus and prophets (present company included) were predicting this.

Guess what? There's always a joker in the deck when it comes to technology, and in this case the joker is the biggest card you can imagine: Spam. The wearisome, inexorable omnipresence of spam has caused consumers to delete immediately any messages not from friends, family, and associates, even if they are legitimate, permission-based commercial communications.

Until the spam problem is solved, email marketing will remain unactualized. What a problem! My server was recently ratcheted up to eliminate spam, which it did, but it also eliminated most of the email I was getting from people I know. The server was ratcheted right back down, and I simply go into the delete mode first thing every morning, a task now as routine as brushing my teeth.

--The prophets of the past (me included) simply KNEW that ever-improving data analytics and management would make for super-targeted, super-efficient direct mail. That's what we were saying for decades, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. How wrong we were! The single most effective and extensive direct marketer in the U.S makes its daily bread, and a lot of it, by sending tons of direct mail into every mailbox that has an opening. I personally get at least one mailing a day from them, and I'm not even a good prospect.

--Prophets of the past, continued: We also KNEW that since keeping a current customer is much cheaper than seeking a new one, companies would reallocate their resources into customer retention and relationship marketing. Wrong again! You can spot the failure by noting the almost instant archaism of the term "customer relationship management."

We used to say "Manage customers, not products or processes." Well, guess what: Customers are a whole lot more difficult to manage. Since they are human and hence flighty and unpredictable, customers may not adapt to being managed as gingerly as more passive entities such as processes and products.

In its illusory pseudo-science, customer relationship management echoes the school of management of the 1960s and '70s, when businesspeople believed if you could manage one thing well, you could manage anything else with equal success. From this belief came the conglomerates of that era, and you know what happened to them.

--On the other hand, one looks at Amazon.com as an absolute model for what can be accomplished. Amazon profiles you to a fare-thee-well, but with delicacy and tact, and presents you with product offerings that relate to things you've bought before.

Amazon is now merchandising this service as "James' Plog," for which I am a Beta participant (be still, my ego!). What is a "Plog?" Glad you asked:

"The PlogT Service provides a personalized blog for each Amazon.com customer. A blog is a straightforward and now widely adopted method of posting a reverse chronological diary on the Internet.

"Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog."

None of this is new except the branding and merchandising. But that's one of the things marketing is all about, is it not, taking something existing and putting a new package around it?

--Outbound telemarketing is dead in the U.S. , as a result of the Do Not Call Registry, which every half-conscious American joined within minutes of it becoming available.or is it? The way my phone has been ringing the last few days, I'm beginning to sniff an unintended consequence here. The Registry has loopholes permitting companies with whom you have an existing relationship, fundraisers, or survey companies to call you.

Wow, do I have lots of existing relationships! Boy, are there lots of fundraisers, especially in this presidential election year. And zowie, everyone and his brother is doing a survey!

I suspect that all these scoundrels are doing better than they used to, because people are answering their phones again, under the illusion that the plague of outbound telemarketing has gone away. It hasn't, it just wears camouflage now.

Hey government, can we tighten things up a bit?

--Business in general, as it's practiced in the America of the 21 st Century, seems more and more designed to confuse, frustrate, and hoodwink consumers.

Product quality in general is quite high. That's one thing the First World does well all across the board. But good product quality throughout an entire category puts everyone at parity. Parity used to be fought by marketing. That's what building a brand is all about, that's what customer service is all about. It now seems to be fought by encapsulating products in impenetrable service environments, where consumer fatigue ultimately equates to "brand loyalty." I simply can't understand my mobile phone agreement, my high-speed Internet contract, or my satellite TV arrangement, and the very idea of attempting to comprehend them gives me a headache. And any efforts to reach customer service will imprison me in voice-mail jail.

I will therefore stick with the devil I know, rather than risk the unknown one. After a generation of nattering about loyalty and its importance, that's where we are as a business culture. It's almost sad, isn't it?