You've heard the old joke — a woman says to her friend, “What a wonderful son I have. He goes to a psychiatrist twice a week, and all he can talk about is me.”
So it is with the once-hot one-to-one concept. Many who invested heavily in software and consultation are talking about it…and the vendors blithely assume a parallel between “talk” and “accolade.”
What, for example, has been a stronger one-to-one icon than Amazon.com? The software is impeccable. Communication with customers is textbook-perfect. Blam! Here's a news brief: Amazon's stock fell because Buy.com was offering a 10% discount on Amazon's book prices, as well as free shipping. So much for customer loyalty.
News releases proclaim that marketers are joyfully reporting their newly established one-to-one programs have enhanced response. Asked what they installed, the answer might be, “We now put the recipient's name in the e-mail subject line.” Now there's a surprise that's about three years old. Or, “We're offering free shipping, like Buy.com.” What the heck does that automatic business booster have to do with one-to-one?
Look: You want one-to-one? You got it. I'll oversimplify and generalize with a broad brush, just to expedite the hate mail this article will generate:
Business prospects want a deal. A deal. Stroking, especially in an online communication, seems phony. Consumers, by and large, also want a deal. The Web is price-driven, and that nasty marketing truism has infected every facet of direct marketing. You want fast sales? Pitch comparative price. You want to project an upscale, elitist image? Then attack generic competition by pointing out to each recipient that you, Mr. Extralongname, certainly don't want to be lumped in with the proletariat.
OK, consultation complete. That'll be $20,000.
Want more for your twenty thou? Visualize this:
A manufacturer of luxury automobiles wants to increase the percentage of lease renewals. So the company calls in a consultant who asks, “What have you been doing until now?”
“Well,” says the executive in charge of this program, “We've been phoning. Here's our pitch: ‘Hey, you'ns better renew dat car lease. Yeah, da new rate is about twenny percent higher, but da down payment is just a little over five thou. C'mon. Our guys have to make a buck, y'know.’”
The consultant ponders. “Nothing really wrong here. But in exchange for an exorbitant fee, our consultancy will really get those renewals jumping.”
“What'll you do?” asks the car guy.
“We'll do what we always do. We'll redefine the type of customer data being captured. You may even find it's better to call the customer ‘You’ instead of ‘You'ns.’ Or you may not. But we'll need a substantial research budget to validate that.”
“Geez! Wow!”
Oh, certainly I'm being wry. I have to be, because it's mildly insane to claim that “one-to-one” is a sudden, epiphanous revelation. The concept goes back to Adam and Eve.
The marketer who needs an outsider to tell him/her, “You need to be user-friendly” isn't a marketer. He/she is an oaf who has a piece of real estate and a computer.
An ancient anecdote: An effective consultant is somebody who, for a huge fee, hands in a lengthy analysis: “Fire your brother-in-law.” Why not, instead of investing in the obvious, attack the obvious? The Rule of the Ridiculous Obvious:
That something is obvious doesn't make it a significant marketing revelation.
What the consultant offered was a rhetorical trick: “It's a well-known fact that a well-known fact is a well-known fact.”
While I'm brewing this ghastly mixture of attack and cynicism, I'll risk broken windows by suggesting avoidance of those who want you to spend money for a muddy, nonspecific result such as “image” or “branding.” Arthur Andersen had both image and brand. WorldCom had both image and brand. SwissAir had both image and brand. Lucent spent many millions on image and brand. Image and brand, in the brutal 21st century business climate, are ancillaries. Want bottom-line results? Offer customers a deal. Offer prospects a deal. The qualifier: The deal has to be clear, advantageous and honorable.
Another venerable rule: Marketing “experts” who are technically adept but imaginatively sterile cover up their imaginative sterility with mechanical tricks.
As annoyed as I am by the posturing and defense mechanisms of those whose image and brand depend on pitching image and brand, I'm not about to lapse into a foolish harangue. Certainly any business organization wanting to maintain intelligent contact with its customers and prospects needs a viable way of doing that. But viable doesn't mean overcomplicated.
A common one-to-one problem is a vendor's attempt to project a single image while wooing many levels of prospects. That's faux one-to-one, because emphasis is on the seller, not the sellee. Media-driven advertising agencies quite naturally will endorse this approach.
Years before “CRM” existed, Viking Office Supplies personalized the cover of its catalog. A mild spurring message not only said to the recipient, “Hey, this is what you ordered before,” but it also encouraged the recipient to reorder and maybe, with luck, select other items from the catalog.
Years before Viking started that practice, the then-upscale Neiman Marcus stores had its salespeople call their personal clientele, apprising them of new arrivals and sales.
Years before Neiman Marcus, the neighborhood grocer said to a customer, “Mrs. Green, we just got in those big tomatoes you like.”
One-to-one isn't new. We don't need consultants to sell us on the concept. We do need all the electronic aids we can afford to implement it more effectively than we've done before. We don't need a sudden re-education based on terminology instead of simple sales psychology.
If all this expensive CRM software and one-to-one consultation is so highly touted, why is it that free shipping quite regularly outpulls all other sales incentives?
I've even seen sweepstakes recommended as a one-to-one tool. Are sweepstakes one-to-one? Hell, no. They're as broad a catchall as exists in marketing. A sweepstakes demands a batch of implementational decisions, none of which has one-to-one connotations.
And what, after all, is the point of a sweepstakes? It's to bring a prospective customer through the door…or to remind a customer that because of his or her “loyalty” the door is open. If you accept the truism that the whole point of spending money to get a customer is to make money from that customer, you have to accept the corollary — repeat business is the lifeblood of any business.
Repeat business becomes automatic only when a customer shifts upward from customer to advocate. The difference: You no longer are in that Murderers' Row of competition. Amazon's experience underscores the myth of 21st century customer loyalty. People are as loyal as the deal you offer. And that doesn't require expensive consultants and software.
So (to irritate vendors of software even more) I opine, with ample scar tissue as backup: Offering “a deal” is a more dynamic, more logical, more productive marketing ploy than trying to project an image.
Whether you agree with my point or not, you certainly understand it: We need machinery to apply principles of salesmanship we surely should know. If we need an outsider to tell us we should requalify contacts…generate new leads…stroke existing customers…telemarket without a “How are you today?” or “This is not a sales call” opening…we have no right to call ourselves “businesspersons.”
A better description would be “beginners.”
Herschell Gordon Lewis is the principal of Lewis Enterprises in Fort Lauderdale, FL and a DIRECT columnist.
