Musings of a Marketing Maven

I wince when direct mar­keters trum­pet their exper­tise at man­ag­ing so-called “con­ver­sa­tions” with cus­tomers or prospects. It must be that their def­i­n­i­tion of a con­ver­sa­tion and mine are really different.

Poor DM exe­cu­tion often reveals how far ven­dors really are from what truly mat­ters in con­ver­sa­tion: lis­ten­ing and respond­ing appro­pri­ately to what the other party says.

Why Aren’t They Listening?

The US telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and cable providers may be among the worst repeat offend­ers of old-fashioned, bad direct marketing.

You can’t help but think that an intel­li­gent invest­ment in CRM linked to mar­ket­ing automa­tion and well-scripted offer trig­gers might go a long way toward min­i­miz­ing wasted spend­ing on unwanted or irrel­e­vant direct mail offers.

Take Qwest, for exam­ple (my local phone provider). More than once a month, for sev­eral years, they’ve mailed me with the same offer: for only $xx.xx per month, we’ll give you “high-speed Inter­net” access. Until fairly recently their direct mail offers were fool­ish enough to describe the ser­vice as “blaz­ingly fast.”

They’ve trained me to be cyn­i­cal about the hype in their offers…

From time to time, I call Qwest to get the up-to-date facts on high-speed access to my premises. (The cur­rent answer: only 256Kbps, for more than $30/month — and my busi­ness is located within 8 miles of Seat­tle. How sad is that!)

Until today’s mail­ing, the fine details in Qwest’s offer never spec­i­fied the actual down­load speed to this loca­tion — even though they have the answer in their data­base. So they waste my time by forc­ing me to inquire, and then frus­trate me when the answer is so far from com­pelling (or so far from the implied promise of their offer). Even my cell phone can con­nect to the Inter­net faster than 256Kbps!

On more than one occa­sion I’ve told Qwest’s CSR that until they can match or exceed the local cable provider’s down­load speeds to this loca­tion, I have no inter­est in hear­ing about Qwest’s Inter­net access ser­vice. If they were record­ing my feed­back in a CRM sys­tem, and using it as a trig­ger in their direct mar­ket­ing cam­paign, they would know not to bother send­ing me an offer guar­an­teed to have zero appeal.

Bad DM Exe­cu­tion Can Tar­nish the Brand

Instead, they remind me at least once a month:

• how lit­tle they lis­ten to me or my busi­ness pref­er­ences, even when I make the effort to pro­vide feedback…
• how out-of-whack their value propo­si­tion is, given its high price for a sur­pris­ingly low bandwidth;
• how behind the times their mar­ket­ing automa­tion and cus­tomer intel­li­gence sys­tems must be;
• how poorly linked their cus­tomer ser­vice cen­ter must be to their mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tion or CRM sys­tem (if they have one);
• how offen­sive it is that they keep wast­ing paper, ink and other sup­plies on some­thing that will only end up in land­fills or recy­cling centers.

Sadly, they’re not alone in this kind of behavior.

As for me, I’m not in the busi­ness of pro­vid­ing direct mar­ket­ing ser­vices (or coun­sel­ing clients about DM), but it makes me cringe when I see the same mis­takes repeated over, and over, and over…

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