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One afternoon in early June, I checked into the Sheraton New York for a direct marketing conference. At the reception desk, I handed the young man my credit card and asked for a non-smoking room. Upon completing the paperwork and presenting me with the plastic card-key, the young man asked which newspaper I would like delivered to my door in the morning. My choices: The New York Times or USA Today. In my opinion, USA Today is pop junk with absolutely no reason to be published unless you are in Montgomery, Alabama, where it looks pretty good. I asked for The Times. In my room I found a Mr. Coffee with a sealed foil packet of Starbucks. With my morning coffee and The New York Times, I was prepared to be delighted with Sheraton Hotels. Clearly, Sheraton management was inside the heads of its guests, thought how they thought and felt what they felt. And were able to gratify their guests because they knew what it would take to gratify themselves. The next morning when I opened the door of my room, guess what was awaiting me. USA Today. In The Wall Street Journal, Herbert Klein wrote: I forgot what my college professor Frank Knight said. People don't want their wants satisfied. They want better wants. Yes and no. The Sheraton New York room clerk had created a better want. Had he said nothing, I would have been happy with USA Today. "Ah, how nice," I would have thought, "a free newspaper." Instead, the New York Sheraton had set itself up for failure and set me up for disappointment. If you you don't deliver what you promise, you're better off making no promise in the first place. If you can't deliver on customer loyalty program, scrap the program. Perhaps the true secret of great marketing is summed up in the words of consultant Marilyn Black: Under promise and over deliver. Textbook Correct Marketing. A couple of years ago, I met the manager of Philadelphia's great hotel, The Rittenhouse. He told me about a corporate titan from Spain who had bought a company in the area and was staying at the Rittenhouse on his his first visit. If he liked the hotel, presumably he would be back and would steer other executives from his various companies there. On the morning after his arrival, he opened the door of his suite and at his feet were two newspapers, the European edition of The Wall Street Journal and that morning's Madrid daily. He was promised nothing; the Rittenhouse had over delivered. Customer delight. Herein lies the difference between a marketer and a product manager. Product managers manage products. Marketers acquire and delight customers. That's why marketers make a lot more money than product managers. Method Marketing: What Is It? You're David Oreck. You manufacture and sell the best, lightest, most rugged and efficient vacuum cleaner ever designed. It is in use by more than 50,000 hotels worldwide, from the elegant Windsor Court in New Orleans to the Holiday Inn in Seattle. It's a truly great product; every home and office in America should have one. Your message to the consumer: Take the Oreck challenge. Send for my Oreck-XL for a 15-day free trial. When it arrives, clean all your rugs and carpets with your current vacuum cleaner. Then go over them again with my Oreck-XL, look in the bag and see how much dirt your old vacuum cleaner left behind. If for any reason you feel my Oreck-XL fails to live up to my promise or your expectations, return it. I'll pay shipping both ways. You owe nothing. This is an entirely risk-free offer. Your key copy drivers: fear and salvation. Fear of disgusting dirt and leftover dust in your carpets; salvation with an Oreck vacuum cleaner. In the words of the great 1920s advertising practitioner, Claude Hopkins: The right offer should be so attractive that only a lunatic would say "no." Oreck has done this. Or has he? Where Oreck's Message Will Totally Bomb. You're a homeowner. You have had chronic allergies all your life. You don't have a single carpet or rug anywhere. Instead, your entire house has exposed hardwood floors. You won't have a vacuum cleaner because it blows dust around. How does Oreck's message resonate with you? It doesn't. If Oreck knows this about you, he has two choices: (1) Spend no money promoting his product to you, because you don't have carpets and don't believe in vacuum cleaners. (2) Offer you the deluxe "hypo-allergenic vacuum with a filtration system that eliminates 99.7 percent of all the irritants from the air. The point is, unless your message is specifically tailored to the individual's interests, cares and fears, you will not create a want for your product or service. Department store mogul John Wanamaker once said, "Half my advertising is wasted." He added, "Trouble is, I don't know which half." With the precision of database marketing -- and the sophisticated arithmetic associated with it, no reason in the world exists for a marketer to waste half his advertising. Method Marketing It all began with Stanislavsky A number of buzzwords and phrases have been coined and are in current use -- and all of them have spawned excellent books: MaxiMarketing, 1:1 Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Guerrilla Marketing, Database Marketing. So why "Method Marketing?" I believe the most important text from which to learn the essentials of marketing is An Actor Prepares, by Constantin Stanislavsky, for 40 years director and acting teacher at the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky's premise: That only by thoroughly understanding how the human mind works -- what causes the emotions of exclusivity, flattery, fear, greed, guilt, anger, salvation -- can an actor actually get inside the head of the character in a play and become that person so convincingly that the audience will undergo the necessary suspension of disbelief to make the play real. For example, Dustin Hoffman is legendary for the intensity with which he studies the characters he portrays. When he was signed to star in a television production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Hoffman apparently drove the entire cast and crew nuts in rehearsals with his long discussions and debates with the playwright -- and himself -- as to why Willie Loman said this or did that; these dialogues were followed by endless different readings and bits of business until Hoffman was satisfied that they were completely right for the character. Hoffman didn't simply memorize the lines and recite them; he became Willie Loman. This is the guts of Method Acting -- formulated by Stanislavsky and, later, articulated by Lee Strasberg, who founded the famous Actor's Studio from which graduated so many great performers from Eli Wallach and Marlon Brando to Marilyn Monroe. In an interview to promote a film, actress Nicole McEwan said: The greatest thing about acting is that you get a chance to live in the skin of a character for two or three months, and it's never boring. Same thing in marketing. You cannot write copy or make a live sales pitch without getting inside the head of the person with whom you are communicating and becoming that person. This is Method Marketing. In the words of freelancer Bill Jayme: In the marketplace as in theater, there is indeed a factor at work called "the willing suspension of disbelief." 1:1 Marketing Don Peppers and Martha Rogers have come up with the concept of 1:1 Marketing -- the individual talking directly to the individual. Stan Rapp calls it "intimate advertising." What is really happening in the field of direct marketing is nothing like what Peppers and Rogers are suggesting. Consider the following scenario: Recently I wrote and designed a subscription acquisition mailing for one of the major financial magazines. (Its title began with the letter "F.") I dreamed up a new premium -- a special report using attention-getting past articles from the magazine. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were pictured on the cover of this special report with the article title, "How We Did It." Other stories included: "What to Do When Your Boss Asks You to Lie" and "Are You Being Paid Enough?" The mailing went out and beat the control by 30 percent. Pay up was 50 percent of control, so the net-net was 65 percent of control. The package was never used again. When the dust settled, I called he circulation manager who had hired me. "My package beat control by 30 percent, is that right?" I asked him. "Yes." "But pay up was 50 percent of control for a net-net of 65 percent of control, correct?" "That's right." "Tell me," I said ."What did you send the folks who responded to my mailing package?" "What do you mean?" "Did you send them new fulfillment material that reflected my tone of voice in my mailing and referred to the new premium? Or did you send them the same thing you send everybody, whether they come in via TV, a bind-in or blow-in card, a sweepstakes, Publishers Clearing House or whatever?" The circulation manager's one-sentence reply was loaded with layers of meaning. "I think the retention people sent the same thing they send to everybody." Let's parse that reply. (1) "I think..." He doesn't really know. His job is to get new subscribers. Everything beyond that is out of his control. (2) "...the retention people..." At this publication are two groups: acquisition and retention. ACQUISITION: "Why can't you get these turkeys to pay?" RETENTION: "Why do you bring in all these useless tire-kickers? This enables the two to blame each other which means their jobs are safe. The point of this is, Nobody owns the customer. Nobody's in charge of the product. (3) "... sent the same thing they send to everybody." The subscriber responded to my package -- with my premium, with my voice -- and then promptly received communications that bore no resemblance to the original offer. I had gotten inside the new subscriber's head and under the skin and landed a trial subscription. The "retention people" wrote back in an entirely different voice. Disconnect. Add to this a billing series, a renewal series and probably some 40 other product managers within the mother organization blitzing the new subscriber with offers in many different voices, and you emphatically do not have Method Marketing. You emphatically don't have 1:1 Marketing. What's going on is: Mass Marketing to One Person. This is epidemic in the direct marketing business. For any kind of Method Marketing -- or 1:1 Marketing -- to be successful, it is imperative to reach the customer or client or donor with the same voice. Imagine seeing a play with Dustin Hoffman in Act One being replaced by George C. Scott in Act Two who is then replaced by Denzell Washington in Act Three. It simply would not compute! The renowned Lester Wunderman -- in his mid-70s -- flew to Hong Kong to give a luncheon speech at the Asian Direct Marketing Symposium in 1997. Buried deep in his remarks was a line he practically threw away: "In the future, product managers must learn to be customer managers." The current buzz word is "integrated marketing" -- which, as I understand it, is the same message going out to the individual customer or prospect whether it be by mail, space, telephone or TV. This can only work if one person -- one Method Marketer -- a single person -- is in charge. A committee made up of representatives from space, TV, direct mail and telemarketing thrashing out a common voice will fail. Committees design camels, not thoroughbreds. Why Size Matters The companies and men I describe in the book, Method Marketing, are not huge. They have revenues of eight- and low nine figures. All of them go (or went -- two are no longer in business) out to their customers and prospects using one voice. When multi-billion dollar conglomerates--for example, American Express or Time-Warner-Disney-CNN, with all their books, book clubs, videos, CDs, magazines, collectibles, toys and catalogs -- start hammering the individual customer with myriad offers in myriad voices from myriad addresses, suspension of disbelief is impossible. The magic is dead. Using Method Marketing, you can keep the magic alive. For the complete story of Method Marketing and the 8 Master Practitioners. |