Its All About the List ... Stupid!

Plantronics makes telephone headsets. For all I know they make the best telephone headsets on the planet.

What I do know is that they are sending me a series of expensive dimensional direct mail pieces filled with expensive premiums and I am in no position to buy or influence the purchase of their products. They are wasting beaucoup bucks on a phantom prospect. So far I've pocketed the goodies and not responded. Perhaps at some point they'll come looking for me -- or not.

It's a classic direct marketing mistake. Plantronics put their money into high end printing, dye cuts, great premiuims, shrink-wrapping and postage. Its an impressive effort. The pieces are well executed. They generate interest and excitement when they arrive. And each one gets opened and carefully examined. But its great form without business function.

They should have put their money into buying a better list or into telemarketing and/or modeling the one they bought. They should have known that I'm a schelper not a decision-maker before they spent the big bucks to reach out to me.

It will be interesting to see what happens. In a sense what they do next will give me greater insight into the go-to-market strategy of Plantronics. In some ways I'll learn more about them from this campaign than they'll learn about me. I wonder how it will shake out?

In some companies the marketers earn their points just by getting a campaign out the door. In this case, I'm on the third touch of a highly produced campaign which probably required the coordination of many moving parts. Getting a sequence of mailings like this one out is no mean feat.

In other companies, they judge marketers on the number and quality of responses they generate. Somebody who actually runs a call center or who actually needs this stuff probably did respond. With luck, the response rate will hit the industry norm and/or the agency's forecast. So my silence can be comfortably written off as being within the standard margin of error. Mailing me is just part of the cost of doing business in a 2% response world.

In hard core companies, marketers live or die on the number of qualified leads they create that turn into genuine sales opportunities and on measurable ROI that can be traced to marketing spending. Here too, I'm probably invisible because some of the responders probably will mix it up with Plantronics' sales guys. And in the end some will buy. And while I represent avoidable waste, when they divide the costs into the new revenue generated, I'll probably get lost in the shuffle.

But just imagine how much more Plantronics might sell if they hadn't wasted time on me and 10-20% of the other names on the list just like me.