Who's in charge?

Apparently there's a reduction in DM spending.

Well, yes, but ...

A large agency network has lost 14 projects in the last couple of weeks from a single client. The agency would have needed to hire freelancers to finish the work on time, and the agency's FD had told everyone he/she needed to give approval of anything which couldn't be done in-house. When a week later the agency still hadn't said it could do the work (because they couldn't get an answer from their FD), the client quite understandably gave it to another agency. Note, the client spend did not change.

It is entirely possible to create your very own recession, if you really want to.

Photo: chefranden

The ship that didn't launch

Just caught up on some news from Australia (an excellent blog called VeeDeePee), where Vodafone has decided that nobody will get printed statements any more, and they will all be online.

For those of us looking at the opportunity to improve the effectiveness of transactional mail by including relevant marketing messages in customer statements, it's a helpful reminder to think about the whole media mix.

Of course there is still an opportunity to introduce relevant marketing messages online. In fact, there's also the interesting idea of being able to change those messages over time - so that if you are reviewing an old statement, the marketing message can change from the one that was there when it was current.

Nonetheless, this is a wake-up call. Some clients are moving a lot faster than their agencies and service providers expect.

Photo: bobster1985

Balancing act

Important time now for the new business: some serious interest from some seriously interesting people; need to work on funding (which needs business plan); need to work on the network who will help deliver the service; need to set up meetings and generate some business. All are important. The balancing act, is to devote the right amount of energy and time to each. The mental balancing behind that, is to do the important stuff first, even if - especially if - it's the stuff that I enjoy least (like say, picking a completely random example here, setting up meetings).

Fortunately, I've decided I have to write a blog posting first.

Photo: tourist_on_earth

Two million mistakes

So, a marketing agency has been fired because of innacuracy in the statistics it used in its mailings. According to the report, 2m out of 184m of the letters mailed in the last few years, have been 'wrong'.

You could argue that this is a special case, because it involves the BBC, which has become supremely sensitive to any allegations of impropriety after various episodes of phone-vote rigging and lapses in editorial standards.

Or you could look at the absolute numbers, and say two million letters with avoidable errors constitutes a great deal of damage to public trust.

Or look again, and see that the whole story is based on one complaint to a national newspaper, a newspaper which had already embarked on a campaign against the BBC. And the complaint was triggered by the receipt by one person of duplicate mailings which carried different statistics.

So actually the _real_ mistake was to mail the duplicate, with different data.

How much do you trust the process you use to ensure you only mail people once? Do you think you need to understand it a little better?


photo: www.ClownInsurance.co.uk (yes, really)

Basics

A couple of weeks ago, those nice people at British Gas decided to send its customers a heartwarming message about its commitment to the environment. I received a small box containing four low-energy lightbulbs, and a nice leaflet explaining how much money they might help me save.

Except - and stop me if you've heard this before ...

1. I got two boxes, a couple of days apart
2. The name on one of the letters was wrong
3. The salutation on both letters was gibberish
4. The postman had to knock on the door each time, because the box would not fit through the letterbox (or indeed _any_ letterbox, so his round that week was taking a very long time indeed, about which of course he was rather upset)

Arrange the following words into a well-known phrase or saying: foot, shoot, the, in, yourself

I think I understand how this has happened. At the same time I am speechless at the waste, ignorance and arrogance the whole thing betrays.

The letter was signed by the Managing Director. I may not be the first to be writing him a slightly more carefully crafted response.

Crunch?

1. The local coffee shop says it has never been busier, and they are surprised, as they expected to be an early casualty of people cutting back on discretionary spending.

2. A household name in doors and windows quoted us a laugh-out-loud high price for a replacement door, admitted that 'they don't sell many of these', and ended the call.

3. One of our many local charity shops is dutifully offering '3 for 2' packs of its (charity!) Christmas cards.

It's a confusing picture of the economy at the moment, almost as if we don't quite know how we're supposed to behave.

Picture: 30cakesin30days

Utopia

Attended a briefing session yesterday from the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Not only was the content fascinating, it was also interesting to listen to the language being used.

One initiative in development, Utopia, is actually an exercise in the management of the complete customer lifecycle (the Chief Exec calls it the 'patient experience', and acknowledge that they are at the 'foothills' of this approach).

They are developing a programme of 'Evidence Based Design' which will involve patients in the re-design of the way care is provided.

There is acute awareness of the challenges of the marketplace which has been created by the changes in funding and oversight of the health service.

It's a hugely complex organisation, with 700,000 patients / customers a year. And it's starting to talk about the patients' perspective, and how to incorporate that into service delivery. For an organisation whose processes were mostly built in the 1940s, it's impressive stuff. What are you doing at your company?

photo: Frank C Muller