Consumer Intelligence

Reprinted from DMI-Online:

We have moved to a spangly new office building, which is wonderful news for us.  Made better by the fact that it’s costing us less than our old building, for more space. Yea for the recession!

The problem with this new building is that it doesn’t exist.

At least not in the opinion of the Post Office Postcode database. This does not seem to stop the post lady delivering the post every day, but it does stop me being able to place orders.

Over the last few weeks, I have not been able to do business with three companies because they can’t find our address on their system. And for the benefit of doubt, they did actually refuse to take my money because of that.

Why is that?

In my opinion it’s because the IT department has put its claws around the throat of the sales and service departments. Unless the PAF file or IT department say my building exists, it doesn’t.

The ‘red weed’ of IT is spreading further, with many companies finding that it is almost impossible to get things like websites built UNLESS they are done by IT. IT, by the way, needs a full spec, a six-month lead-time and a budget that is astronomical to do this.  And changes . . . well those are a three-month process. I know of one bank that needs three months just to make a one-word change to their website.

I know of another customer who has been forced to allow IT to run their PPC campaign. After all it does involve computers.

It’s time to say Enough! It’s time to stop the madness. Marketing is not a place with a two-drink minimum that is all about being ‘creative’. Marketing is the process of communicating with prospects and customers. By its very nature, that involves the use of IT.

The fight back has begun, I am pleased to see: I noticed in my newsagent (remember those?) the other day that there is a new magazine, all about blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

Yes, that’s right, a paper-based magazine about blogging, Facebook and Twitter!

It might not last five minutes, but it will irritate the technocrats. And while they are ranting, I suggest you run into the IT department and pull the plugs out! Perhaps then we can get back to real business.

During a recent visit to Hungary I got a brief glimpse of the future and it made me think.  And it ought to make you think.

A few years ago, I remember a James Bond film in which our philandering hero had a BMW that he could control remotely from his phone. He was able to drive with the aid of cameras and steer as well.  Naturally, he was able to fire the heat seeking missiles, but that goes without saying.

While in Budapest one of my fellow speakers was telling me how he could “talk to his BMW”, which was parked snugly, outside his house 8,000 miles away.  He could tell were it was, what the tyre pressures were and a load of other information.  He could also set the car so that it would not exceeded a speed limit and would not allow itself to be driven into certain areas.

It reminded me of a feature I had seen on US TV about a car thief that was caught by OnStar, the owner had let the police remotely stop his car.  The system was touted as a major step forward in crime fighting.

Serendipitously for you, dear reader, I was also reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.  (This saved you from a much more boring article I was writing). The book has a chapter talking about how our personalities are Jekyll and Hyde like. The suggestion he puts forward is that there is 200% uplift in accidents when teens drive with 2 other teens in the car.  There are similar statistics for choice of music and other distractions.

His solution?  Predict the behaviour and train the car to intervene.  So when rap music is played above a certain level and speed exceeds 65mph on the motorway, have the station switch to Classical music and the speed limiter kick in.

It must have felt like rocket science when he wrote.  Now it’s doable.  So what’s stopping us?

Perhaps part of the answer comes from another part of Ariely’s book, where he talks about when Market norms and Social norms collide. The best way to describe this is, if I were lucky enough to be invited to your house for dinner and, at the end insisted that I paid, that would be uncomfortable.  A Market norm (paying for dinner) and a social norm (having someone over for dinner) would have collided.  Alternatively, if I brought a nice bottle of wine, well that would be sort of expected.

While contemplating this thesis, I was approached by someone who wanted me to invest in a Social Networking project were consumers were paid to promote things to their friends.  In principle this is a really good idea, it gets the message out there fast, and uses all that’s good about social media.

But the problem is that it crosses a line.  Let’s say I recommended to you that you buy a BMW in this article.  I’m not, but let’s just say it.  If, later, you found out that I was being paid by BMW to make that recommendation, you might feel that I had taken advantage of prestigious position on the penultimate page to flog you something.

Once a line is crossed from social norms to market norms, it’s almost impossible for the relationship to go back.  You can read Ariely’s book yourself to discover the science behind my argument.  The issue that this causes for us pariahs of the Market is that we want to find a way to use this social environment for our benefit.

Often, the most we can hope for is that social media will not treat us too badly; reputational damage limitation is a major job by itself. I have just allocated a member of our team to scour the Internet at least once per day to see what is being said about our key customers and us.  At least that way we know.

Social media is the big thing at the moment, there is no question about that, whether at the US-DMA annual trade show or on-line. Every connected DM’er is trying to say they have it tapped.

The truth is they do not.

Social Media has the power to intrude in a way that the Market has never intruded.  It can be a power for good and a power for bad.  If you don’t do it right, it will turn and bite you so hard it might kill you.  In Hungary they talked about the Internet user having turned from a subservient Dog into a freelancing Cat.

I’d say it’s more like a tiger, lovely to look at, great to stroke, but you would think long and hard before you let it come sleep on your bed at night.  Taming the Internet Tiger has become a huge challenge; it must be done right or not at all.

For my money it’s the big marketing challenge of 2010.

This month, I want to do something low-tech for you. Especially for my brow-beaten readers who feel that all this highly-connected

Twittering is just a bit, well, juvenile.

I want to remind you of the most powerful secret in marketing and I make no apologies for repeating a point I last made a year or two ago in this very column. Something that, as on-line media grows in strength, flourishes and grows itself, even though it is as far from the connected world as you can possibly be.

I want to introduce the wonderful Leila and her pen.

It’s not a very clever pen; in fact I think it’s just a standard ball-point (I’m going to wait a couple of seconds for that to sink in. Yes, dear reader, I am talking about a Biro!).

In this over-communicated, over-connected world, the simple things in life – like Leila and her Biro – are actually the most powerful things in the world. They generate loyalty, respect and, in this case, help to fill a plane.

Let me explain

Leila works for Continental Airlines, a company which offers direct services from Bristol to New York. This is extra-ordinarily good news for me, as I like to make that trip occasionally.

After returning from a recent trip to the US, I went through the usual pile of mail that had amassed on my desk:  ‘Junk, junk, bill, junk, insurance mailing, bill, hmm…. what’s this….?’ A hand-written A6 envelope found its way into my hand. And without hesitation I thought, ‘I must open this now.’

The envelope contained a hand-written note from Leila, enclosing her business card with her mobile phone number and email address. It thanked me for my recent flight with Continental Airlines from Bristol, hoped I’d had a pleasant flight and stay in the US, asked me to let her know if there was anything she could help with in the future. And she said she looked forward to seeing me again.

A hand-written, thank-you letter.

From an airline.

Folks, when was it that you had a hand-written letter from anyone, for anything?

Probably not for a long time, like me – so long ago, in fact, that today’s computer spell-checkers don’t even recognise the word ‘notelet’!
This small notelet is, for me, the most powerful piece of mail that I have received in a longer period of time than I can possibly imagine.

What’s more, I still have it. And I am writing about it right now!

It’s so simple. And yet airlines are spending millions trying to sort themselves out on Facebook or Twitter. They are spending hundreds of millions on frequent flyer programmes that all pretty much do the same thing.

Admittedly, I was flying business class, so they had more reason to care, but I flew to New York with Virgin this year, where I am a gold cardholder and they couldn’t remember my name on board, let alone send me a letter. Or even an email! I flew to Canada with Air Canada and couldn’t even get a screen that worked, let alone a letter to say thank you.

In fact, the last time I received a note like this was when I was in New York and the hotel manager sent me a note saying, ‘Welcome back to your home in New York, great to have you back. James.’  I kept that one too; it was on James’ own letterhead stationery and was beautiful. But then, James is a friend and a classy guy, running a five star hotel chain.

Leila is the International concierge at Bristol Airport for Continental Airlines.

My point is this: I am a member of other airlines’ loyalty programmes; I have the Platinum cards and the Black cards and all that sort of stuff; my wallet is stuffed with plastic, but plastic doesn’t engender loyalty for me the way that pen and paper can.

And it’s the same for your customers and mine.

This lesson is a very personal lesson for me. My father is the king of the personal note. Ask people years later whether they remember getting a letter from him and they will say, ‘Yes, it was hand-written.’ Ask them if they still have it. Mostly, they say yes.

In a society that is so much about instant gratification, this is astonishing.

So put down your loyalty programme, rest your weary card-embossing machine, send your creative agency home for the night. Buy yourself a Biro and start writing some notes to people. It doesn’t have to be War and Peace. Just a quick thank-you would do it.

After all, your customers just helped you survive a financial tsunami; a thank-you note is the least you can do!

During a recent visit to Hungary I got a brief glimpse of the future and it made me think.  And it ought to make you think.

A few years ago, I remember a James Bond film in which our philandering hero had a BMW that he could control remotely from his phone.  He was able to drive with the aid of cameras and steer as well.  Naturally, he was able to fire the heat seeking missiles, but that goes without saying.

While in Budapest one of my fellow speakers was telling me how he could “talk to his BMW”, which was parked snugly, outside his house 8,000 miles away.  He could tell were it was, what the tyre pressures were and a load of other information.  He could also set the car so that it would not exceeded a speed limit and would not allow itself to be driven into certain areas.

It reminded me of a feature I had seen on US TV about a car thief that was caught by OnStar, the owner had let the police remotely stop his car.  The system was touted as a major step forward in crime fighting.

Serendipitously for you, dear reader, I was also reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.  (This saved you from a much more boring article I was writing). The book has a chapter talking about how our personalities are Jekyll and Hyde like.  The suggestion he puts forward is that there is 200% uplift in accidents when teens drive with 2 other teens in the car.  There are similar statistics for choice of music and other distractions.

His solution?  Predict the behaviour and train the car to intervene.  So when rap music is played above a certain level and speed exceeds 65mph on the motorway, have the station switch to Classical music and the speed limiter kick in.

It must have felt like rocket science when he wrote.  Now it’s doable.  So what’s stopping us?

Perhaps part of the answer comes from another part of Ariely’s book, where he talks about when Market norms and Social norms collide.  The best way to describe this is, if I were lucky enough to be invited to your house for dinner and, at the end insisted that I paid, that would be uncomfortable.  A Market norm (paying for dinner) and a social norm (having someone over for dinner) would have collided.  Alternatively, if I brought a nice bottle of wine, well that would be sort of expected.

While contemplating this thesis, I was approached by someone who wanted me to invest in a Social Networking project were consumers were paid to promote things to their friends.  In principle this is a really good idea, it gets the message out there fast, and uses all that’s good about social media.

But the problem is that it crosses a line.  Let’s say I recommended to you that you buy a BMW in this article.  I’m not, but let’s just say it.  If, later, you found out that I was being paid by BMW to make that recommendation, you might feel that I had taken advantage of prestigious position on the penultimate page to flog you something.

Once a line is crossed from social norms to market norms, it’s almost impossible for the relationship to go back.  You can read Ariely’s book yourself to discover the science behind my argument.  The issue that this causes for us pariahs of the Market is that we want to find a way to use this social environment for our benefit.

Often, the most we can hope for is that social media will not treat us too badly; reputational damage limitation is a major job by itself.  I have just allocated a member of our team to scour the Internet at least once per day to see what is being said about our key customers and us.  At least that way we know

Social media is the big thing at the moment, there is no question about that, whether at the US-DMA annual trade show or on-line.  Every connected DM’er is trying to say they have it tapped.

The truth is they do not.

Social Media has the power to intrude in a way that the Market has never intruded.  It can be a power for good and a power for bad.  If you don’t do it right, it will turn and bite you so hard it might kill you.  In Hungary they talked about the Internet user having turned from a subservient Dog into a freelancing Cat

I’d say it’s more like a tiger, lovely to look at, great to stroke, but you would think long and hard before you let it come sleep on your bed at night.  Taming the Internet Tiger has become a huge challenge; it must be done right or not at all.

For my money it’s the big marketing challenge of 2010.

Enjoy it!

A few days ago a hand written note arrived for my daughter. She had just been in the school musical soiree so I was thinking it would be for her. She had gone off to the US, so with her permission, I opened the letter.

It was a thank you note, handwritten and perfectly done. But it wasn’t for her singing, but it was for flying to the US on Continental Airlines.

My jaw dropped. The station manager at Bristol Airport is writing to my daughter, by hand, to thank her for flying with them.

Has Virgin ever done that for you? BA? AA? In fact has any airline ever sent you a hand written note to thank you for flying with them.

That’s right, never.

If they have then comment now.

If not then try flying Continental airways out of Bristol to New York.

I received a letter this morning from an accounting company marked “Private and Confidential”

Feeling all excitable I decided to open it.  You never know with accountants.  It could be a long lost relative deciding to leave money to me in their will.

It wasn’t it was an offer to do payroll for our company.  That’s an interesting service, agreed, not one I need to buy.

But why is it Private and Confidential.  In order for it to be private it must be something that is for my eyes only, something that is personal to me.  For it to be confidential it must be something that if anyone else was to read it then I may be in deep trouble.  For it to be both basically means, if anyone touches this, other than me, they will be shot.

This letter was so non-private and non-confidential that the sender didn’t even bother to sign it themselves, it was a digital signature.

Shame on them.

This is a reckless abuse of the post and of an address on an envelope and I have had enough of it.  I intend to use this blog to post the names and web site addresses of any company that sends me a Private and Confidential letter when it isn’t.  That way you can harass them directly.

So let me just retrieve this letter from the bin.  Oh yes, here it is Bishop Fleming Chartered Accountants, based out of Torquay.   torquay@bishopfleming.com is there email address.  I publish this here, because it will certainly be harvested and then spammed heavily.  Just like they did to me.

A few months ago, a magazine approached me from the insurance industry to do a mystery-shopping piece about insurance companies. For those new to this back page, or who haven’t followed the Ian Hughes story, my company is a mystery shopping company, which sort of focuses on that market. So the offer was interesting for us.

We worked hard on it for about 3 weeks to collect the data and turn it into an interesting article of about 1,000 words. Having submitted it on time, things went quiet. After a few days I wrote to the magazine to see what they thought. They wrote back saying that they really wanted to name and shame the bad companies, they weren’t interested in celebrating what was good in the good companies.

For me that causes a problem, a public naming and shaming is a bit like bring one of those paparazzo’s that follows stars around. I’d rather be a Hello magazine sort of mystery shopper, it just feels classier.

So I said no and the article was spiked.

You have got to hate sub-editors, with this esteemed magazine as the obvious exception. Clearly this is the Hello of Direct Marketing magazines.

I found this annoying, so I thought I would write to the editor. The best way to find the editor, go to the web site and look under contacts, Right? Well, when I went to the site, it gave me an error message when I called up contacts.

Being devious, I thought I would go in through the subscription route. After all, the whole point of publishing a magazine is to get people to subscribe. Isn’t it? Well, I clicked on the subscribe button and…error message.

Bottom line, you can’t buy from this company, and they don’t like to make it easy to talk to them

Imagine that, having a web site where you can’t subscribe and you can’t contact them to tell them you can’t subscribe

You know that they look at the web site regularly, because they will want to make sure that everything looks right in the work they have written. None of them have tried to subscribe or contact themselves via the site, though. Naturally, they will look at the subscriber stats and say “well no subscriptions from the site this week, that’s because no one ever subscribes from that site.” Little do they know the reason why?

The story doesn’t end there. 4 times over 6 months I wrote to them to tell them what was wrong. And the site is still broken.

What you have just witnessed first hand is not something terribly complicated. It is a simple piece of mystery shopping. In mystery shopping terms it is a Lowry. Simple and uncomplicated.

But when was the last time you mystery shopper yourself? When was the last time you checked out your own web site, actually bought something from yourself or tried your customer service? Or have you tried calling your company and seen how friendly the greeting is? Seriously, next time you call your office think toy yourself “would that be OK if I was a customer?

When you have a complicated system and process it is easy for things to fall over, it’s easy for mistakes to happen. But these sorts of mistakes are unforgivable.

It’s bad for a little back street Insurance Industry Magazine. But it can happen to the best of us. While writing this article I was considering whether I should go to DMDNY in New York. So I went to the DMDNY web site and clicked on exhibitors to see if I knew any of the exhibitors going. Then I thought I would check the agenda. A broken link.

Arrgghh….

We should know better, we could know better, but without good testing and good mystery shopping we won’t know. Another way to do it is to look at the error messages thrown up by your web site, but who has the time for that.

In the wonderful world of marketing, we often spend so much time thinking about and worrying about the look and feel of something that we completely, totally, utterly forget the execution. And the very people who should really care about it seem to be blinded to it. In Insurance Times doesn’t sell subscriptions then the sub-editor is out of a job. But the sub-editor doesn’t take enough pride to make sure the web site it right. Similarly whoever runs the web sites for DMDNY, if the show doesn’t work they will loose their job. Maybe a web site that works is a good place to start.

I can preach this lesson because I have failed at this, badly, so many times in my life that it is crazy. I have built so many web sites that build to dead ends. Where customers end up frustrated and annoyed. It can often happen when you are rushing to get something done and, as a result, you forget the details

In a world full of rich communications, you just expect the web to work. And if I have a choice of buying from you or your competitor, and your web site isn’t working, well guess where I am going!

When was the last time you gave your own web site a good kicking? And your competitors?

Apparently I am being followed.

Somewhere, out there, in the ether, someone is following my twitter feed (you can follow me @ianchughes.

You can also facebook me, I am Ian Hughes (no surprise there).

Oh, and I am on linkedin.

I used to be on bebo and myspace as well, but you can ignore those. I have an MSN account and a Yahoo account and several email addresses that are required for mystery shopping purposes.

You can check my blog out at www.consumerintel.com or here at dmionline.com. you can email me, call me or text me.

In short, I’m on the grid.

So now what?

It seems to me that with all these connections my life is not that much richer and neither is that of those around me. You see I can facebook my daughters (can you use facebook as a verb?), I can twitter with my eldest. Some of my friends are on Facebook, some are on LinkedIn.

But in all of this I am finding little extra value as an individual. And if I can’t find value, well it won’t survive.

A recent survey of twitter found that less than 10% of the users are creating about 90% of the traffic, or content or something like that. Bottom line, most people are inactive. MySpace has even announced that it is laying people off.

IMHO (also know as In My Humble Opinion) there is a lot of communication but not a lot of conversation going on.

And it is this conversation that engages people.

For me, a large amount of facebook and twitter is just that, it’s a lot of people making noise. It’s a bit like someone in the old CB radio days (remember those), randomly pressing the transmit button every now and then and saying “I’m driving along”, “Now, I have stopped”, “now I am driving again”.

It’s the electronic equivalent of saying “look at me!”. Before you know it, people will be writing columns for magazines. God forbid!

But where is the value for you as a marketer. There are some great examples of marketers that are using Twitter, like Jet Blue and iPhone. And my good friend Aleksandr Orlov is on Facebook with nearly 500,000 fans.

But the question is, does it make me want to buy car insurance, an iphone or fly jet blue. And the answer is….no.

So what’s the point?

We have tried doing some advertising on Facebook and, I have to say, it worked to a limited degree. But is that because Facebook is a good place to advertise, or because we happened to be one of the first. Will it really work long term?

Let me give you one example of where social networking does seem to be working. On LinkedIn I have a group of people who went to Harvard with me, we are spread across the 6 continents of the world living disparate lives. LinkedIn gives us the ability to reconnect our community. As a result of linked in we are organizing a physical reunion, in order to match the virtual reunion. And this does seem to be working, and it is very simple.

However, recently we had a recruiter try to join our group in order to try and offer members of the group a job. Needless to say we declined. But what would be something that we as a group would be willing to accept? And could the company make money out of it?

Folks, I don’t know. I am not sure what the value of blogging is, or the value of being connected. But here’s what I am planning to do. Over the next month or so, I am going to try my best to get and stay connected. I am going to try to immerse myself in this new digital.

I am going to try and become as connected as a man can be and see what I think some of the angles are. And then I will report back.

Right now, I enter this with a preconception that says this: the only company that has successfully managed to make money out of mining the interests of consumers is Google. Every other company that has worked to build a community of content, which it gives away for free in the prospect of making money from other sources, has failed.

It fails because people get bored or because they object when companies overtly try to monetize the relationship then all this fuss and nonsense is all fuss and no fizz.

It’s been a few months now since you’ve had a half decent book review from me, although some would question whether there has ever been a decent one ever. So I thought I better catch up on my reading.

And who better to read than Jack Trout and his most recent book, In Search of the Obvious. I picked it up while waiting to travel back from my recent visit to the IDI conference organised by the marvelous DMI crew in New York recently. For those of you who didn’t attend, it was a fascinating day. For me a good conference should always have a little bit of stuff that makes you go “hmmm…I never thought of that” and a little bit of something that makes you go “you have to be kidding.” IDI had all of that.

But, rather stupidly on the flight back, I checked in my copy of Inside Steve’s Brian, the story of Steve Job’s and his rise, fall and rise again. We will leave that for another day. Instead I rushed into Borders before getting on my plane in search of something, anything, to keep me amused. And in my usual way I saw this book in a prominent, eye level position in the business section and picked it up.

I have read some of his other books before and his 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing sits half read on a shelf in my office. Fortunately, having read this book I think I can pretty much say I don’t need to finish that or read any of his other stuff.

Let me do the review bit first. If you don’t like book reviews you can skip the next paragraph, then I will do some thinking you can take to the bank based on the book.

So to me, the book felt like a combination of new and interesting takes on some old ideas. In order to get to that stuff you have to read a lot of regurgitation of these ideas (cheap copy to write because you just copy the stuff you wrote before and paste it again, then sell it as new) and some clear swipes at campaigns and companies that he doesn’t approve of (or pitches he didn’t win?). It’s a great book, but you have to bare with it, in the same way as you bare with my rambling in these articles. Did I mention how cheap it is to regurgitate copy because you just have to copy the stuff you write before? Oh, I did. On a side note I should say that whoever edited the book should have been shot. But that doesn’t make it a bad book.

OK, so this is the bit you can take to the bank, courtesy of Mr Trout. Fundamentally, what the book is about is simplicity in Marketing. What Jack Trout says is that bored marketers spend too much time and energy trying to justify their position to Boards that really only care about this quarters numbers. As a result they tinker.

Trout points to the proliferation of Coke Brands, Mercedes Benz Vehicle ranges and GM’s demise as examples of fidgety marketing departments.

The thesis is to keep things simple. If you are the Real Thing then keep it real. If you are the Ultimate Driving machine, don’t play with it. If Safety is what you do in cars (Volvo), then why create a sports car or a convertible. It all about as relevant as a Manbag.

In between these pages there is some genius stuff that some of the speakers at IDI could really have used. Often, as marketers we spend time trying to think of new and complicated ways to get our message over when, actually what we should be doing it trying to find simple ways to get simple messages over. Twitter, facebook and WOMM are all clever, but getting overly clever about those campaigns will not help a company succeed.

If you are a Newsweek or an HBR or a Nikkei, all of whom presented at IDI, then reading In Search of the Obvious is for you. Sitting in the audience I could not help but believe I was watching the beginning of the end of these organizations. They seem to have forgotten what it is they do and why people subscribe to them. To me it seems obvious and their value proposition also seemed obvious. They own content and great creative writing. If you are HBR, you own some of the most respected comment in the business world; people want to know what you have. You aren’t going to sell more subscriptions by cheapening that brand; you are going to sell them by connecting readers to the content. I subscribed to HBR because it connected me to a body of thinking, not because of the special offer. I stopped subscribing when I stopped reading; I stopped reading because I didn’t connect.

In short, looking for the obvious, the blindingly obvious is not a bad think, it’s a good think. Cutting back to what is simple is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength. You should dream of being able so simple.

And so do I

(Published in DMI January 2009)

The New Year brings all sorts of strange excitements with it, what will 2009 be like, will we still be in recession this time next year?  Will things be better?

Don’t ask me, I figure if the Bank of England can’t work it out then how the hell am I supposed to! 

The anointment, I mean election of Barack Obama in the US this month brings with it an exciting new time for him and for all of us.  But I often wonder to myself what it must be like to be a New President taking up office. 

It’s difficult enough running a business that employs 50 or so people, but a whole country of 300 million.  We have competitors that we pitch against on price, but they never try to unleash a nuclear arsenal on us.  Nor we on them, we just don’t have the budget for it.

So, knowing that Mr Obama is a regularly reader of this column, because he sends me correspondence either criticising or making suggestions for new topics, I thought “What better time than right now to give him some tips on running the country.”  As you do.

In thinking these principles of life through I have tried to also make this relevant to you, my other reader.  So if you think I have missed any then just drop me a line at the usual location and I will be happy to add them in.

1)   It’s not about data it’s about information

As a President numbers and people with opinions will surround you.  But much of the time it will be almost impossible to get to the truth.  Remember that information is data that is meaningful, relevant, useful, timely and accurate.  Keeping one eye on the big picture and another on the minutia is an essential skill in Direct Marketing and as a President.

2)   Testing is everything

Whether it be Missile Shields, Star Wars defence systems, new Levies in Louisiana or Hurricane procedures in Florida, testing is everything.  Don’t just have one policy, have a number and try each of them.  Over many years people will have grown accustomed to things being done a certain way.  That doesn’t mean to say it’s right.  In fact the longer that the “control policy” has been in place the more chance that a “test pack” might just beat it.  If you don’t test, you don’t know.

3)   If you fail then acknowledge your failure, learn from it and move on

We can’t all get everything right all the time.  Not even you, Mr President.  Mistakes are part of life’s way of teaching us lessons after we leave University.  I make lots of them.  But the worst kind of mistake is the one were you don’t say “Sorry, I made a mistake.”  And you learn from that experience and move on.  Making the same mistake twice is the worst form of mistake; it means you didn’t learn properly from it the first time.  Like Guantanamo Bay.   It’s a mistake, say sorry, close it and move on.

4)   Listen to more than one response

Any company that on listens to one customer’s opinion is mad.  In the same sense as only listening to the views of one group is wrong, whether that group be democrats, Washington Insiders or Americans.  The world is filled with different colours, as are you.  Being able get a sense for each of those colours and make decisions that are best for all, rather than the interests of a few is highly sensible.  So no “Drill Baby, Drill” talk please.

5)   Use as many media as possible

To some extent you did this in your campaign, but the new world order is about engagement and dialogue.  How you include the views of everyone in an open dialogue and discourse is key to getting them to buy in to “Change”.  If a river is flowing towards you it’s much harder to make progress than if you have it at your back.  Using the internet and TV as a means of engaging America is crucial.  As DM’ers we use all the channels at our disposal.  We need to find the most efficient and effective way of getting consumers to act.  No action means, no sales.  No sales means, no business.

6)   By consistent

And lastly the issue the issue of consistency.  As DM’ers we see this all the time.  One message delivered by TV, another through the Letterbox and a third over the Internet.  Different graphical styles, different text, different descriptions.  In other words a communications mess with a confused customer who won’t buy again.  Or vote for you.

In short, being a good President is about having the good sense and skill to be able to sense the mood of the people and communicating with them in order to achieve an action, then monitoring that the action taken is still in line with the mood of the people, so that they will come back for more.

So now we have the troubles of Mr Obama sorted out there is the small issue of this side of the pond.  Prime Minister, would you like to sit on the couch and take a few calming breathes before we deal with your problems.  I need more space for that one.