Archive for January, 2010

It  never ceases to amaze me how today’s marketers are running around trying to figure out the latest and greatest in social networking strategy but keep forgetting the most basic of marketing principles: know your customer. We’ve all been through it. Direct mail from services we wouldn’t ever logically use. Phone calls from companies that know we have good reason not to use their product. We all deal with it. It’s a bit of a nuisance but we ignore it. It’s just that as a marketer it’s infuriating because it’s wasted dollars.  It’s wasted effort. Not to mention all the trees we killed in the process.

And I’m not talking about a company being tenacious. Tenacity in marketing is good. Imperative even. Never take no for an answer. I get it. I practice it. But sometimes, you’re just barking up the wrong tree. For example, my husband, who is many years before retirement and his golden years, has hit the AARP mailing list and no matter how often we remind them that he is young, virile and not on Medicare – they still waste money – oodles of money – sending us direct mail. Several a month. AT & T knows I just bought the new iphone. They know my contract has recently been extended. They know everyone in my family is registered with AT & T and have very expensive phones. But they still waste money telling me about all the lower quality phones just in case I decided to downgrade?

This past week was yet another example of this from our local public television broadcasting station and I decided to challenge them on it. Several years ago I bought a DVD set which automatically signed me up as a supporter. Fine. No problem. I support them. It was a great show. I love the DVD.  Several years later,  I still get calls and emails and direct mail asking me to rejoin. Fine. Great. They are tenacious. I love it. Recently, on several calls I received from them, I indicated that we no longer receive the channel at all due to the cable selection we have. I would not be interested in supporting them for logical reasons. They wrote it down. Great. I got another call. They wrote it down again. I got a direct mail (which I calculated to cost no less than $1.50 plus postage). I got another call. Then I got mad. Not mad because I had to tell them again not to call me. That’s not a big deal. But mad because some Marketing Director in a cushy office is not doing his/her job. That pisses me off.

Being the marketer that I am I couldn’t help but challenge the call center on why they were not keeping track of my responses. I am not suggesting that they not be tenacious and continue to bug me because the numbers show that eventually I might break down and support them again but when a “dealbreaker” enters the situation like you are moving or you don’t get the channel anymore or you just went bankrupt or whatever, at that point you are wasting money you could be spending on warmer leads. And you can simply move the lead to another “cooler” list that you can keep contact with in cheaper ways,  like email.

The response from the call center was that the call center doesn’t have anything to do with the direct mail list, yada yada. The same response I usually get when I challenge the call center – which unfortunately, I have lots of opportunity to do because so many companies do not cross reference their lists.

The bottom line is obvious. And perhaps a lesson. Years ago I got my start in advertising in a Recruitment Advertising firm. To get new business, we would scan the New York Times and Wall Street Journal help wanted sections, cut out ads with typos or that we think we could have written better and mail them to the response in the ad with a business card. We got tons of business that way. It was cheesy but in reality it worked. Perhaps that should be a new sales strategy every time I see someone doing it wrong!

So for all the marketers who don’t know their customers – if you get a package with all your misguided direct mails – you’ll know who it came from.