- 24th February 2012

My watch broke. That normally happens when you drop it on a floor from a height. So I took it to a jeweller to get it fixed.

After the jeweller informed me that it would need to be sent away, he asked me a very odd question. “Are you timeless, sir?”

For a moment I thought about it, was it something in the way I dressed, classic tailoring or perhaps a look of world-weariness caused by excessive bingeing the night before.

“Sorry?” I blurted out.

“Timeless, sir? Can you tell the time today?”

Suddenly it occurred to me that he was talking about the fact that I had just given him my watch, and so would be without the ability to tell the time. This is not something I generally worry about because I always have access to the time somewhere or other.

But suddenly the fear of being timeless or “without time” gripped me. What if I was running for the train, looked at my watch and it wasn’t there? What if I got home and was relaxing and suddenly panicked because my watch had gone?

The stress of being timeless was suddenly overwhelming.

“Yes, I am timeless.” I said, with which the assistant pulled out a temporary replacement watch, which he polished and gave to me. Time had been restored.

Thank God.

The thing that sticks with me though, is the word. “Watchless” would have been a good word to use, I would have got it instantly. But a watch is a feature of being able to know the time. Being “watchless” I can live with but being “timeless”, without the benefit of time? Well that’s another issue.

Thinking about the difference between features (a watch) and benefits (time fullness) is a tough one for any marketer. Features are hard and you can easily resonate with them, but benefits, well that’s different.

The watch repair guy gets it. Why can’t we all?

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

- An Article for the DMI – February 2011

In decades from now they will look back on 2012 and say, “that was the year when everything changed”.  I say this with a very clear sense that I will be proved right.

2012 is the year that Facebook is talking about IPO, if they haven’t already by accident.

There hasn’t been this much excitement in the DM world, well, ever.  It represents the final coming of age of Direct Marketing.

It’s tough for me to get more excited about the opportunities.  The only thing I feel mildly sad about is the fact that so many DM companies have failed to make the transition.  Companies like Readers Digest, or Publishers Clearing House or Littlewoods (pools or catalogue) have all either failed or morphed.

Others are/have also struggled to find their voice in this every crowded digital space.  Having spent nearly 15 years in and around the digital space, a few truisms remain as clear today as they were before the letters “www” were put together to mess things up.

1)    Quality, Service, Price.  Select 2 and don’t moan when you don’t get the third.  Trying to do all 3 of these things is not a way to build a long-term business venture.  You cannot deliver quality and service at a cheap price.  Period.

2)    Sometimes old mousetraps work better.  The number of times I hear people talk about “this great idea” that millions will want to buy is nearly exhausting.  Bottom line, a good idea, well marketed can also succeed.  A great idea with no marketing will fail.  It’s not always true, but assume it is, it will make your life better.

3)    Customers are not numbers?  Do I need to say more, you have all been treated like a number as a customer.  You didn’t like it.  Why do you do it to your customers?

4)    Think: What is the Over Benefit of my product/service? Why should someone believe me? What makes me DRAMATICALLY different?  Answer those questions and win.

5)    It’s not about this sale; it’s about the next one.

6)    About 50% of stuff is bought by women.

7)    About 50% of consumers are over 50.

8)    There are more people in China and India than there are here.  The only new thing is that they are now buying what we make and not selling to us.  What can you sell to them?

9)   Information is data that is Meaningful, Relevant, Useful, Timely and Accurate.  A mailing that isn’t Meaningful, Relevant, Useful, Timely and Accurate TO THE RECIPIENT is called junk mail.  Or Spam.  OR a Cold Call.  There is no such thing as a call/email/letter that is meaningful, relevant, useful, timely and accurate to the recipient that does anything other than make the recipient say “wow, thanks!”

None of this is old school or new school, it’s just educated.

What I don’t understand is why people don’t seem to get it.  They pound their heads on the walls of stupidity.

Have I missed something, am I wrong?  Tell me!

- An article for the DMI - June 2011

Nothing irritates me more than being data raped.  You have a nice cosy relationship with someone and before you know it, they are using any information they have gleaned from you to stick it to you.

Imagine the scenario, I go in to buy a car, a used car.  The dealer says “let me check to see if we have any of those cars available.” I am invited back to the office while the dealer checks the system.  “What’s your name?” he asks.  I reply and he follows-up, “and can I get an address?”

At this point the answer should be “No! Just tell me if you have the sodding car I want or not.”  Let’s be clear, if I wanted to give my information to the oik, I would have said “Do you mind if I give you some details so you can tell me if you have the car I want?”  I mean, after all, it’s me who wants to spend the money, and I am not asking him for his home address and telephone number, even if I wanted it.

I have been the victim of Data Rape, a slowly pervading scourge that is permeating shops and places of work.  It is the same scourge that wants your name and address at the wine shop when you go to buy a bottle of wine.  Or asks if you “Want to be on our mailing list” at a jewellery shop.

To my mind, this Data Rape usually takes places when the selling party doesn’t really have a lot to say and has employed some corporate “Head of Direct Marketing” that has issued a directive to capture all names and addresses.  Not because it provides more value to the customers, but because it gives them more names.

At my local coffee shop I have a loyalty card, it gives me a 10th coffee free after I pay for 9.  It doesn’t ask my name or address and it doesn’t send me pointless emails/mailings that I don’t want and didn’t ask for.

What I don’t understand is why the moron called the Direct Marketing Manager thinks that this is OK, why anyone thinks this is ok, or even legal.  I am certain it is neither.  It’s not OK because you are making the assumption that I want a relationship, when what I really want is a transaction.  You want a relationship, not me.

Secondly, I have a right to say “No” just like in any rape case, and it’s the reason why I use that word.  By violating my right to say “no” and to opt-out, you commit an offence against me – which is punishable.

It still mesmerises me that anyone could get this last piece of the jigsaw so wrong.  This kind of marketing is the lowest form of scumbag marketing that there is, and I think it ought to be stopped.

It won’t be, because it would involve some very big brands (like car manufacturers), having to put a line throw their database.  Why?  Well because they don’t know if they have permission or not to have my details.  They don’t know if the dealer asked the question and they can’t prove that he/she did or did not.  But simply if you don’t know, you can’t assume.

So stop it now.  If you want respect, then start by giving it.

- An Article for the DMI – February 2012

Direct Marketing is looking at its greatest ever threat.  New and obtrusive ways of using the medium in order to get to consumers that are simply wrong.

Let’s be clear, they aren’t per se illegal, but that’s just because legislation hasn’t caught up with them and when it does, then it will take out vast chunks of the industry.

Take, for instance, the large insurance group that assumes that if you get a quote from them that you have opted in to all their marketing.  They then bombard you from as many angles as they can, forever.  It obviously works for them, otherwise why would they do it.  To opt back out again you have to write to them, by traditional mail.  So you take out a quote on-line, but you can only opt-out by letter.

I checked, it’s legal.  It isn’t morally right, but it isn’t illegal and they think it’s perfectly OK.

Then there are the SMS spammers who send you a text saying that you are entitled to £3,500 in pay-outs from a crash you have had.  They don’t even know who you are, the texts are sent out at random from a SIM that gets deactivated the second the network spots it.  Is it illegal? No.  They aren’t holding my personal information, it just feels personal.

The DMA is up in arms; phone networks are up in arms.

Then there is the very large social network that allows advertisers to use the demographic information about its subscribers to target consumers.  Again, this isn’t just legal, it’s very clever.  But is it right?

And finally, there is the incessant stream of emails that I get from companies saying that they can sell me an opt-in email list of 1,000,000’s of business names and emails for just £250.00 or whatever the paltry sum is.  Simply drivel and I know that because they didn’t get my email address through “opt-in” to email me with the offer – at least not any opt-in that I, as a consumer, am aware of.

Does it pass the Watchdog/60 Minutes test?

The answer is that consumers don’t get this sort of stuff to them, it’s a bunch of weaselling. Stirring up consumers makes good column inches for newspapers and voted for politicians.

If Facebook users truly understood how it made money, would they share as much information with it? And what about Google?  Is the “free” price of these services too high and, in fact, completely misunderstood by consumers?

The industry has a problem, because these companies do not consider themselves part of the establishment. In fact they refuse to be part of the establishment because the trade bodies won’t let them do what they are doing.  They still continue to call what they do “Direct Marketing”.  One director of one of these companies even boasted to me that they are one of the largest and most sophisticated direct marketing companies in the UK.

They laugh in the face of toothless self-regulation.

For me, the only answer has to be education – a firm and robust campaign by the industry exposing the people who do this.  By this, I mean the companies and the individuals who run them being named and shamed, with people putting their heads above the parapet to do it.

Doing this might bring the potential of legal action against those people making the exposure.  But look at the alternative, banning Facebook; banning e-Mail marketing in all its forms; banning Direct Mail in all its forms.

In order to do it, we need a strong and confident industry; one that can speak with one unanimous voice and which is prepared to be unpopular in some quarters.  That’s asking a lot from our trade bodies and representatives.

The problem is that legislation is not a laser, it’s a sledgehammer.  Once the media and political bandwagon start rolling, it is simply going to roll over the entire industry and that is going to eradicate lots of things that people want as well as the things they hate.

Few people would doubt that something needs to be done.  The direct marketing industry is under attack by direct marketers.  The very tools that make us successful are also being used in anger against us.

At the heart of this is pressure that is building inside the fundamental fabric of our society, we are living in an information age where good information is more valuable than gold.  Protecting that information, that gold, should be of primary importance to the industry.  The price to be paid for sloppy information policies is the annihilation of the industry by cack-handed law makers desperate for votes or desperate Editors desperate to fill column inches and sell papers.

What are you going to do?  It’s your problem.

- An Article for the DMI Newspaper  -  August 2011

At last, we have come of age.  At last the DM industry can hold its head high and say “We have arrived!”  Why?  Because we have been fined.   Over the last few weeks, the biggest International Direct Marketing fine ever handed out by a regulator has quietly surfaced and then disappeared.

The fine, $500,000,000, was not levied against a company that was engaged in cross border activity, but one that was providing the advertising space.  If you haven’t worked it out yet, the fine is for Google and was given to them in the US because they allowed Canadian Pharmacies to advertise on google.com, even worse, to specifically target US residents.

It used to be that international DM was about getting a list and having to target people in another country, now I can place some ads on Google and be doing international DM within 15 minutes.  No lists to buy, no postage.

But with this great revolution in Direct Marketing (do I have to call it Digital Marketing?), some things seem to have been lost along the way and it never, ever hurts to repeat them.

Firstly, the great thing about Direct Marketing is that because the relationship is so intimate, between you and the recipient you have the opportunity to target.  At the heart of all could Digital/Direct Marketing is good targeting.  In Google terms, these are the long tail key words or just trawling through your web logs to see the journey that your customer went through prior to coming to you and responding to that.

Targeting means more than that, in the digital world you can and you should reinvent yourself for each target segment, a different landing page and a different journey.

And the other great difference of DM is testing.  The ability to test different copy, different creative and see how people respond to it.  It’s this last bit that seems to get lost.  Watching how people respond and finding out why they respond is the most informative and interesting thing in the world.  As the MD of my company I still, today, take an interest in the customer journey through my site.  Why?  Because it’s these journeys that inform me about what customers are looking for.

My customers are the best research tool I have and testing allows me to see how they will react to different events.

So, given that we are now mainstream, why do so few Digital/Direct Marketers recognise some of these old techniques.  Well, it’s partially because of the / in the previous sentence.  Digital marketers see themselves as far too intellectual to muck about with Direct Marketing, that’s about envelopes and paper and Junk Mail.  And we wouldn’t want to be associated with that!

The Google fine shows us that DM is now being taken seriously by Regulators, now we just have to hope that DM’ers can take it seriously too!