Going Cold Turkey on DM

I’ll talk more about this later, but I wanted to make sure I remembered to do it. Good thoughts over at Johnnie Moore’s.

[later...]

I appreciate what Johnnie’s talking about here, nay, I’m in bed with it. What a luxury it would be to take my own organization and completely dismantle the marketing organization in favor of sensible marketing and branding. What a luxury it would be to experiment with taking an entire marketing and advertising budget and applying it to “customer experience.” What a luxury it would be to manage to achieve acceptance of such a plan to implement.

The challenge is not in the philosophy; I imagine I’d be hard pressed to pose the question to those in my field and not find a majority that would far prefer message marketing over DM as a strategy to combat the competition for signal we’re all dealing with right now. It’s a war zone that’s forced us to compete not just against others in our competitive sphere and industry. Now, we’re competing for attention with those in the same channel: Clarion is pitted against Lexus, Southwest Airlines against Budget Rent-a-Car, University of Phoenix against Molson, even Intel against Microsoft. The hypothesis is simple: the public’s bandwidth for advertising signal and patience in receiving the advertising stream are directly related and notoriously finite. In an age of advertising bombardment, the producer that wins the public mind share is the one that’s at the mic at the right time, on the right page, on the right dial, etc.

The solution right now, while we’re all buying into it anyway, is to beef up the lower cost per lead initiatives and increase the number of times we touch potential customers. When I compare a reasonable standard cost-per-lead for a radio campaign (typically branding) with the same for direct mail, direct mail wins every time. Do the same between direct mail and the internet? Internet wins. And in a radical shift in the marketing mix, wholesale chunks of hard-won ad dollars are being re-allocated to the lowest cost initiatives that allow advertisers to achieve higher frequency with new touch points. And because of money and infrastructure, those of us who may disagree on principle are forced to wait it out.

The variance between cost-per-lead radio initiatives and the same on the Internet is vast, too. It’ll take longer now for the costs to rise to the pressure point for advertising budget managers to be forced into the new new thing, whatever comes next. In the mean time, take a look at the brand hogs that are often touted as image geniuses, those who have supposedly sworn off the direct marketing curse and remained pure, and ask yourself just how pure they are. When was the last time you received a birthday card from Southwest? How many email promotions do you receive from Apple? How about Dell? New touch points, existing clients, lower cost, higher frequency.

Turns out, it’s a luxury to muse about such wild fantasy, but organizations of any girth are going to be loathe to take to cold turkey with any vigor. It’s certainly a luxury to muse about such things in a climate where it’s almost impossible to be proven wrong.