Musings of a Marketing Maven

I wish some agency that spe­cial­izes in intel­li­gent data­base min­ing and direct mar­ket­ing would help my local phone com­pany stop wast­ing trees on fruit­less direct mail pieces.

Here’s the deal: my recy­cle bin now con­tains some­where between 5 and 10 pieces of unopened direct mail offers from Qwest, addressed to my home address and home-based office (2 dif­fer­ent accounts from their POV). All of these pieces have been deliv­ered within the past 2 days.

All tout some vari­a­tion of their so-called high-speed Inter­net ser­vice. Or ser­vice bun­dles based on high-speed Inter­net band­width. Mean­while, Qwest can only deliver 256K of band­width to this loca­tion — a sit­u­a­tion that has not changed in >10 years.

Liv­ing in the North­west as I do, where the swaths of clear-cut for­est are painfully vis­i­ble, receiv­ing so many use­less direct mail pieces is offen­sive. It makes me sick to think of how many trees are being cut down to pro­duce paper that will be wasted so fruitlessly.

I wish some­one at Qwest (or their agency) would fig­ure out how to link their ser­vice capa­bil­i­ties data­base (NOC oper­a­tions side of the house) with their prospect­ing data­bases. This may be polit­i­cally dif­fi­cult, given inter­nal silos, but surely it doesn’t take a rocket sci­en­tist to develop this data min­ing and tar­get­ing strat­egy. They could fund it by the improve­ment in their con­ver­sion ratios, by the sav­ings gen­er­ated from not send­ing offers that are 100% guar­an­teed to fail.

If they had a more intel­li­gent data min­ing and tar­get­ing strat­egy, they would know that this address (and oth­ers like mine) should be elim­i­nated from their prospect data­base until they can rad­i­cally increase band­width deliv­ery to these locations.

Right now, based on actual band­width to my office, they are so far from being com­pet­i­tive that it’s laugh­able — and it tar­nishes their brand when they make claims that they can­not deliver on. As a result of these poor mar­ket­ing prac­tices, when­ever I see a direct mail offer from Qwest, my first reac­tion is “stu­pid” and “waste­ful” — “not sus­tain­able.” They’ve trained me not to open their mail­ings. Do they even care about their brand?

They send me dozens of use­less direct mail pieces every month, not to men­tion many tele­mar­ket­ing calls that I no longer answer. (I’ve prob­a­bly told their CSRs a dozen times that until they can deliver >10–15 MB to this loca­tion, they have zero chance of per­suad­ing me to switch car­ri­ers.) What a waste of resources.

Will some­one please help this mar­ket­ing depart­ment evolve from the Stone Age?

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