Those Wacky COOs

Is there a school somewhere teaching chief operating officers how to come up with zany marketing ideas? I once worked for a small business-to-business firm where the COO had the brilliant idea of sending DM pieces disguised as invoices — an age-old scam.

“Just bill ’em and see if they pay,” he said. To which we in the marketing department responded by slapping ourselves on the foreheads and saying: “Ouch! Now why didn’t we think of that? Oh, Bob [not his real name], you’re so brilliant.”

We didn’t say anything of the sort, of course. And now I can’t remember if we were ever able to convince Bob that his plan was a) stupid, b) moronic, c) imbecilic, and d) unethical without mailing a few of his faux invoices. But let’s just say Bob’s new marketing gizmo never caught on the way its wildly successful unethical cousin, “Try this — J,” written on a yellow sticky note, did with newsletter marketers a few years back.

And now the latest wacky COO idea comes in the form of an anecdote told by Peter Johnson, the Direct Marketing Association’s vice president for research strategy and platforms. He told it during a presentation of the group’s annual economic impact study, The Power of Direct Marketing, at the DMA’s recent fall conference.

According to Johnson, he was approached by a panicky direct marketer whose COO decided that all the company’s marketing except e-mail should be eliminated. The reason: E-mail returns a whopping $48.56 for every dollar spent on it — compared with, say, catalogs, which return $7.22, according to the DMA’s most recent figures.

Never mind that there are very few e-mail lists to rent, or that most firms have at best 20% of their customers’ e-mail addresses on file. This is an idea from a man — not Johnson, the COO; Johnson’s against it — who hasn’t an inkling of what the marketing department does.

And unfortunately, the person in charge of marketing is probably lower on the organizational chart than Mr. Idea Man from Ops. So rather than falling on the floor gasping in bouts of hog-snorting laughter until the Idea Man leaves the room in an appropriately embarrassed silence, the marketer is forced to patiently explain why the plan is, shall we say, maybe a little shortsighted.

There are two things going on here: a lack of respect for marketing and a lack of respect for e-mail. Ops guys treating marketers like dimwits who must be spoken to slowly in monosyllabic sentences is nothing new.

However, e-mail falling victim to ops’ anybody-can-market mentality is dangerous. Whenever it looks like a company might miss its numbers, it’s always the ops guys who suggest — “suggest” being a euphemism for “order” — the short-term marketing fixes that invariably have a lasting and negative impact on the brand.

“Start blasting out those e-mails!” or “Segment? What are you, crazy?! We could miss a sale!” would be typical ops-type we’re-missing-our-numbers suggestions.

Unlike other marketing channels, though, e-mail has this thing called the “report spam” button that ISPs use to determine whether to deliver incoming mail. If a company gets a spammy reputation, soon enough its e-mail won’t reach even intended recipients.

Translation: An asset that returns $48.56 for every dollar spent grinds to a halt all because Mr. Idea Man from Ops decides that the answer to e-mail’s stunning ROI is to pollute people’s inboxes with unwanted messages.

Note to ops: We find your marketing ideas extremely entertaining, really we do. But please leave e-mail alone.