HERE'S A NOVEL IDEA: Only a credit card company's marketing department should craft its pitches. Its lawyers, operations and accounting people should have no say in what goes out unless the pitch violates the law or some internal financial policy.
Also, the person in charge of a credit card firm's direct mail campaigns should have risen up through the ranks of sales and marketing and can't come from ops, accounting or corporate law.
Then maybe, just maybe, we could eliminate direct mailings like the following Discover Card reactivation effort.
The campaign came in an envelope with “Account Notice” printed on the outside. Inside the envelope was a card from Discover's “Usage Department.” That's right, it wasn't even from Jane Smith, vice president of card usage. It was simply from the Usage Department.
Wow. It's not every day a message arrives from a credit card's usage department. This was certain to be a critical communication. Had someone been banging up charges on my card?
“It has come to our attention that you have not made any recent purchases with your Discover Card,” the pitch began in some sort of typewriter font. Actually, eight or 10 years is more like it. Sounds pretty serious. Were they going to deactivate my account?
Nope.
“Use your Discover Card and receive a 0.0% promotional APR on every new purchase you make between 8/1/06 and 1/25/07,” the ice-cold pitch continued. “This low rate is valid until February, 2007. If you have any questions about your Account [What is it about banks and capital letters?], please call 1-888-883-4402.”
And if the warm, friendly tone of that paragraph wasn't enough, under it was printed: “IMMEDIATE RESPONSE REQUESTED.”
Oh, now they're yelling at me in passive voice. That'll get me to respond. Please tell me no one with actual marketing credentials crafted that pitch. It was Ralph, the head of Discover Card security, right? Right?
Next, we go from a pitch written in bank bureaucratese to one that's just as dry and has the added benefit of being just barely honest.
An envelope arrived from RBS recently with “Verification of your address on our records” printed on the outside.
The teaser was immediately suspicious. An address verification? This is a card I use regularly. I get the bill. They get paid. How can they possibly think they don't have a correct address for me?
Turns out RBS isn't remotely interested in an address correction. Inside the envelope were three slips of paper, including an “Immediate Response Form” asking me to 1) verify my name and address as it is shown on the form, and 2) sign on the line to “confirm [my] status as a protected cardholder.”
Signing the immediate response form and sending it back would bring many services, including credit monitoring, twice yearly credit reports, a single number to call to get all credit cards stopped if they get lost or stolen, and a $2,500 “emergency expense fund” I could use for “identity theft clean-up.”
Oh, and a membership fee of $49 would be automatically charged to my card annually, it said in small, sans-serif print on the back of one of the slips.
Ever been at a cocktail party where someone asked what you do, and you answered: “I'm in [mumble something unintelligible that sounds like ‘brecht’] marketing?” Pitches like this one from RBS are why. They are the reason people associated with direct marketing get attacked at social functions held outside the industry. I've been on the receiving end of enough of those attacks to know.
It's understandable that RBS wants to sell credit card protection. But to mask it as an address verification is just plain wrong. Only someone from accounting who thinks marketing is all about sleight of hand would come up with such a pitch, right? Right?
