This is a story about direct mail and money, designed to educate and entertain. The reader has my guarantee that every single word in it is absolutely true.
Once there was a broker who had serviced a particular mailer — a large mailer — for many years. He had lasted through the mailer's personnel changes, marketing changes, package changes, product changes, all changes.
It's axiomatic in direct mail that, when a mailer has a huge and constant turnover in its marketing staff, its principal broker takes on enhanced value. The broker, in fact, becomes the entity to provide the historical knowledge that is so valuable for a mailer. Why didn't that catalog company's list work when we tried it three years ago? Why didn't that list manager give us the 70% minimum guarantee that we wanted a year ago last September? Ask Joe Broker — he knows. And so forth.
At the beginning of his career, Joe Broker had great ambitions: He would study his field with intensity and ambition; he would rise to the top with speed and alacrity. But age and burnout had made him go soft.
Bad professional habits had overtaken his life. He had come to believe that taking mailers to very expensive lunches and forming good friendships with them were more important than making good list recommendations — in fact, he had stopped thinking about good list recommendations.
He believed that walking out of his office at 6 p.m. and leaving his administrative staff to do the paperwork on his clients' campaigns until 2 a.m. was not only desirable, it was just; after all, he was the master and his staffers were merely the peons. They had to do the slug work while he remained in charge of the global view of the account. He thought he was a talented broker, but actually he had simply become good at covering up his own deficiencies.
The broker's decline had not gone unperceived. His best client was watching closely. This mailer's staff had begun to notice all the signs: the list recommendations that had come with no rationale for the broker's selections; the fact that it was not the broker himself but his administrative assistants who got involved in delicate minimum-guarantee negotiations; the tendency on the broker's part to discuss prejudices, feelings and gossip on the telephone with his clients rather than engage in the hard discussions about mailings and marketing possibilities. And then there was the most telling factor of all: The mailer's staff observed that although Joe Broker was the mailer firm's principal list broker, the tests that he recommended finished far worse than the tests proposed by the mailer's other brokers.
Sooner or later, this vast discontent got back to the mailer company's vice president of marketing (heretofore “Veep”). She was a very canny person. Her first impulse was to fire Joe Broker — but on second thought, she had known him for many years; loyalty was one of her very fine traits; and she felt that, if given a warning, he might reform quickly and become the broker he had once been. How to do this?
After much thought, she devised a plan that would teach him a lesson: She would visit her company's in-house Wizard, who would construct a Magic Mirror. When a given person would look into the mirror, all of his faults would be reflected in his face, and none of his virtues. In the case of Joe Broker, this meant that his portrait would reflect a stomach five times larger than the usual one in relation to its body; eyes that could not see; and a skull that, even to the viewer's naked eye, was numb. She would give this mirror to Joe Broker, and when he looked into it, he would realize that this was the way he was perceived by his major client — and he would immediately reform.
She immediately went down the hall to see the Wizard. This particular magician was not, it must be admitted, a top-of-the-line Wizard: He had a silver wand rather than a gold one. He had been denied a gold wand by the Wizard's Association because, some years earlier, he had failed to predict the coming of a major snowstorm in the Northeast three days after his company's Christmas mailing. Nonetheless, he was a very good business Wizard, and his company relied upon him implicitly in all matters of magic.
The Veep outlined her plan to him. A dead silence followed; the Wizard was thinking. And then: “I can do this. In fact, I can do almost anything but recommend mailing lists. But you must know that creating this mirror will constitute a considerable expense. You are asking me to reflect a gluttonous appetite, a blind eye, and a mind that is seriously impaired. I would have to purchase a special wand and many potions to do this. Although I do know a magic house that will offer me four potions for the price of three, I am not sure the entire project would be cost-effective.”
“Can you give me an estimate for this job?” asked the Veep. The Wizard gave her an estimate. A dead silence ensued, the Veep thinking hard.
The next day, the Veep visited Joe Broker in his brokerage offices, fired him in 30 seconds, and upon returning to her own office, took her marketing staff out for a far better lunch than they had ever been given by Joe Broker.
Moral: Does this not go to show that the best business lunch cureth all things, including falling profits?
Bob Castle is a New York-based marketing consultant.
