I know it's February. You've got visions of hearts and flowers (and maybe flower orders flowing in) dancing in your head. But at this writing, I've still got jingle bells in my brain. (The constant ringing is so annoying. But it does drown out the voices.) Here's a few post-mortem thoughts on the holidays.
Let It Snow
It's all in the timing.
I became convinced of this the first weekend of December, as a winter storm blanketed much of the Northeast. Like many people, I had planned to head out to the dreaded malls to do some Christmas shopping. Instead, I stayed inside and logged online to do business with a number of e-merchants.
The cat bed I was going to pick up at Petco for my two four-legged children was instead delivered to my door the following Saturday courtesy of Drs. Foster & Smith. The books for my one two-legged child I was going to browse Barnes & Noble's physical store for instead got ordered from Amazon.com. The relatives I was going to painstakingly assemble gift baskets for instead got bountiful assortments from Harry & David. The out-of-towners that I had been stumped on what to buy for received blankets from L.L. Bean.
You get the picture. The direct sales merchants won that weekend and the malls lost, all thanks to a few measly feet of snow. It got me thinking. DMers should reinvest their marketing dollars into controlling the weather during key shopping periods.
OK, OK. I know what you're thinking. That's a foolish idea. Trying to control the weather is sooo 1980s soap opera villain-ish. And if people hate spam and telemarketing, think how much bad PR it would bring if they found out the industry controlled the weather too.
But maybe bribing weather forecasters to over-dramatize the snowfall predictions so people would stay home would be plausible. Just think about it.
Ho-Ho-Hold It
Speaking of shopping malls, in late November, The Boston Globe ran a front-page story about the proliferation of marketing pitches bombarding shoppers at malls.
Well, they are there to shop, so this is appropriate, right? Depends on who you ask. Some of the pitches highlighted included several targeting kids waiting in line to see Santa Claus. For example, kids waiting to see the man in red at several malls viewed clips for Disney's “Santa Clause 2” DVD, conveniently on sale in the mall. And others had the chance to talk to Mrs. Claus on a Nextel cell phone, also on sale.
When my husband and I took our son for his first visit with Santa, we didn't experience anything like this, not that any of it would have yet registered with my then-11-month-old child anyway. But the whole experience was still a marketing mission to sell photos. While Santa wasn't surly, we didn't get one ho-ho-ho. Nope, it was sit the child down, get child to stop crying, snap the photo and off you go. How many do you want to buy? Thank you and have a nice day.
Sigh. Maybe by next year some enterprising e-tailer will have figured out how to do Santa visits online.
In the Year 2004
It's tough to write columns for a monthly publication. There's always the fear that whatever you pen will be outdated by the time readers see the product. For example, as you open this magazine in early February, consumer opinions may have changed drastically. Angry Americans might be storming Capitol Hill, screaming that they love telemarketing and demanding the repeal of the do-not-call legislation.
Of course, a more likely scenario is that the planet Earth will have been taken over by 10-foot-tall, three-eyed mole people. And they won't like telemarketing either.
What do you think will happen this year in direct marketing? Send your predictions — serious or silly — to me at bethdirect@aol.com and I'll share them in an upcoming issue.
BETH NEGUS VIVEIROS (bethdirect@aol.com) is executive editor of Direct.
