…on smart-alec direct mails

I got an e-mail invitation today that commenced:

Dear Colleague -

OK. I see you still need some convincing that our [event] will be the best use of your most valuable marketing resources-your time and your money.

I don’t know why the people who compose direct marketing e-mails seem to think it’s a good idea to talk to people as if they were complete idiots. This one annoyed me for a number of reasons:

Dear Colleague

I’m not your colleague. I don’t know you. The only thing we have in common is that we work in related fields and I subscribe to one of your company’s newsletters. If it is important to you to create the illusion of a personal relationship then why not start your mail with my name? It’s in your database along with my e-mail address.

I see you still need some convincing…

All you see is that, like 90% of your mailing list, I haven’t registered for your event. Don’t assume that all I need to push me over the edge and sign up is a trite little e-mail implying that there must be something wrong with me for not wanting to attend.

…our [event] will be the best use of your most valuable marketing resources-your time and your money.

Really? If you used your database intelligently you would see that this event would most certainly not be the best use of my time or my money. The event is in Boston. I live in Jakarta. ‘Nuff said.

Note to all the people who write this stuff – treat me like a human being and not like some half wit begging to be shown the error of his ways. And don’t try to persuade me to buy in to your pitch by insulting my intelligence in your opening line.

…on dead horses

My colleague, friend, spiritual guru and mentor David Chard has started a wiki devoted to the study and exploration of human dysfunction. The basis premise (lifted shamelessly from the Introduction page) is that Comanche Indian wisdom says, “When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” In business, government and (sometimes) education often other strategies are tried with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like, “This is the way we have always ridden dead horses.”
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
7. Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
8. Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
9. Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment vs. in history.
10. Changing the requirements, declaring, “This horse is not actually dead.”
11. Hiring contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Declaring that “No horse is too dead to ride.”
14. Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
15. Funding a study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
16. Purchasing a product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declaring the horse is “better, faster and cheaper dead.”
18. Forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
19. Reviewing the performance requirements for horses.
20. Saying this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
21. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

The site is just starting and inviting submissions for Dead Horses. If you have a favorite rant, this is the place for it. My own submission (also a work in progress) can be found under “The (End of) The World According to CNN.” I know David would appreciate more submissions.

…on getting spammed

This week I’ve been invited to join in a couple of important initiatives in recognition of “my key role and experience”. This first was to join an “inner circle” of CFOs (I am not a CFO – I have to take my shoes and socks off to count to ten) and the second was to join a international conference of CMOs (I am not a CMO – I have to take…well, you know).

I appreciate that for a PR guy to whine about receiving spam may seem hypocritical, but the fact that I get (mildly) annoyed by getting spam mail that is at best tangentially related to my professional field gives me increased sympathy for reporters who routinely receive hundreds of irrelevant e-mails from eager young flacks desperate to get their news release into the media – any media. I’m not going to go so far as to start outing all the people who send me e-mails I don’t want, but I have developed a plan for tracking which organisations are selling my contact details to the spammers.

Every time I subscribe to an online service I now enter an e-mail address based on my own domain that uniquely identifies that service. Likewise whenever I am asked by a professional organization to provide an e-mail address I create one for that particular organization. Since my e-mail server has a catch all account for mail to my domain, I can effectively have as many ‘e-mail addresses’ as I like. And when I get a spam email to an address that I’ve provided to another organization then I can challenge that organization directly.

It’s probably a convoluted way of doing it – I’m not on the Tech practice, after all – but I want to know which companies are supplementing their income by selling my private information.

…on Value for Money

Marketing Profs asks “Would you really want to spend $100 on a logo?” I think the answer is “Yes” if the logo was the Nike Swoosh, which famously cost $35. Alternatively, you could spend GPB14,000 and develop a stylish, creative logo like the one that UK’s Office of Government Commerce unveiled in April and has subsequently decided not to use (for reasons which, while lamentable, are perfectly understandable!)

I’m a big fan of the Marketing Profs newsletter and I agree with the main point that generally, if you’re going to mess with your brand, then you probably want to invest in the services of a professional company to do it. However, to say that the only good logos are expensive logos is patently not true.

Yes, the logo is the first impression people will have of your company, but what the logo ultimately comes to mean will depend on a million things, none of which can be purchased from a professional design service. Most significantly, if the subsequent impression is negative, then the money you spent on your glitzy new logo has been wasted.

At the end of the day, the brand is not contained in the logo but in the way the attitudes and behaviors of the company are viewed and interpreted by its stakeholders.

Of course, as a professional graphic designer David Airey has an axe to grind (as do I) and I think his post and the subsequent discussion is well worth a read. Ultimately, in design as well as in corporate communications, you very often often get what you pay for. However, to use a biblical aphorism, you also reap what you sow. Branding dollars are often better spent improving the experience to better meet your stakeholders’ needs and expectations than on creating and launching new corporate identities.

…on Fuel Hikes

As protests and concerns rise across Indonesia over proposed fuel price hikes, companies are going to face a number of concerns among their employees about rising living costs. Salaries are not rising in line with the massive increases in food prices and, with fuel costs going up as well, people are going to start feeling the pinch and companies are going to come under pressure to raise salaries. Given that companies are facing the same cost increases, this is something they can ill afford to do. What’s a smart company to do to maintain employee morale?

The first thing to do is to recognize that the employee’s worries are real. Companies that listen to their employees and make an effort to understand their issues generally build stronger loyalty than those who view their people simply as “resources.” Set up mechanisms within the company to give employees a chance to discuss their problems with people who are empowered to try to resolve them.

Look for opportunities to help employees reduce their living expenses – offer incentives to vehicle pool, provide low-cost company transportation to and from the workplace, share advice on saving energy in the home and so on. No-one knows how to shave costs better than the CFO of a well run company. Help your employees apply those same lessons to their own lives.

At the same time, involve employees in the company’s own cost saving initiatives. Hold internal competitions to create innovative and insightful cost saving ideas. Work with suppliers and channel partners to reduce costs. Help employees reduce their own costs and reward top performers. The more a company is able to create a community approach to dealing with increases in the cost of living, the more loyalty it is going to create among the people that it employees.

…on Inhaling

I picked up this post from Mark Juhn’s blog this morning. Mark is my ex-boss one of the most experienced automotive executives in Korea – former President of Hyundai Motors America and former COO of Kia Motors Corp. You can read the original French article here.

Of course, no resident of Jakarta is a stranger to sitting in a car behind a bus belching clouds of noxious vapor, but I have to say, I’m not sure that walking in the streets is necessarily any safer than viewing that exhaust from behind several air filters and an air-conditioning system.

The good news is that the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities projects that demand for motor vehicles in Indonesia will grow from around 22 million per year in 2005 to almost 80 million per year in 2035! The vast majority of this growth is in two wheel motorcycles, which of course are not regulated as tightly as passenger cars in terms of their emissions. Many also run on oil/gas mixtures as well, which are significantly more polluting than regular gasoline engines. So we can all look forward to even more air pollution and, if it were possible, more crowded roads in the future.

Doesn’t look like I’ll be walking to work any time soon.

…on Jakarta

Jakarta looks like somebody dropped it. It’s one of those delightfully unplanned cities that just seems to keep growing and growing and not really going anywhere. Like my old home in Seoul, though, the city centre has nice wide avenues built to let the Powers drive through in their air-conditioned limousines without having to toil through the grubby masses who pay their salaries.

Then someone introduced motorcycles. There’s something very egalitarian about Indonesian motorcycle riders. They don’t care who you are or what you’re driving. They don’t care which side of the road they are on. They just know that they have to get somewhere and you are in the way.

In Korea the terror of the roads is the propane delivery boy – a 20-something student on a 125cc death trap with the back end jacked up so high that his nose is three inches of the handlebars and four tanks of propane gas strapped to the back. No helmet, no fear, no regard for anyone on the side walk. Which is probably where he’s driving. By those standards the roads in Jakarta are quite tame.

This the third country within which I’ll be plying my trade as an itinerant flack for Edelman. And the third time I’ve made a serious attempt at keeping a blog. In the past I’ve always failed because I insist on taking a few hours to write each post. None of that stream of consciousness stuff.

Not this time, though. A self-imposed limit of 300 words per post on whatever topic grabs my attention. Probably mostly on communications and what’s going on in Indonesia.

The first post is always the hardest to write – it’s the last one that’s easy. With a little luck (and a lot of inspiration) the last post will be some time away.