This work is not important

We’ve heard this often.

Another one we hear, somewhat less often, is: “We’re doing it for billing. Don’t get involved.”

The second is downright idiotic. Unless we are doing charity, we all work for money. For billing.

By that logic, only those who work for charity can get emotionally involved.

Ironically, they’re the ones who can’t get too involved. Because they frequently have to make very hard choices. About who should get aid first and who’ll have to wait. They have to take enormously risky decisions, on whether A will work or B. Because if A doesn’t work, it’ll be too late for B.

So it’s they, not we, who have to harden their hearts. It’s they, not we, who have to be ‘professional’. It’s they, not we, who have to keep one eye on the money at all times. If they go wrong, other people lose lives; if we go wrong, people – we – at most, lose jobs.

That said, working for money shouldn’t be shameful. It doesn’t mean ‘disgrace of talent’. Maybe communists think like that. Are we communists? If we aren’t, why should we feel so bad about being paid for an honest day’s work, more so when the day so often drags out into the evening and night?

Getting money is not a good enough reason for not taking our work, and, by extension, ourselves, seriously. Perhaps a prostitute shouldn’t hope for much because she’s getting paid. The same logic needn’t apply to us, unless we wish so.

Also, there’s an important difference between her work and ours. Sex is normally not bought; our work is always bought.

There is nothing wrong in selling it. And there is no reason why professional pride should come as a free gift with that sale.

Anyway, let us return to the title: This work is not important to him.

Let’s rethink this one by asking three questions.

First, what is his – the client’s – salary? Is it not, as a minimum, 50% more than yours, even when he has the same experience as you? If the work was not important, why is his company paying him so much to get it done? Why are more and more companies adding direct marketing and CRM managers and paying them far more than agencies pay their employees?

Ok, client companies often have very different economies than agencies, so some comparisons will be erroneous and misleading. Still, the client’s employer is paying him to get work out of you. That should be good enough for you to believe that your work is important.

Second, what will happen if you, that is, the agency, goofs up? Will he, that is, the client company, say, “It’s alright, don’t bother”? Or will he bite your head off? He’ll do the latter.

Possibly people react badly when anything they pay for goes wrong, regardless of whether it’s important or not. Yet, we may suspect that whatever you’re doing is important enough for the client to be bothered.

Third, how does it matter if the work is important to him or not?

It’s very important to you. It’s your job. It’s your source of livelihood.

A restaurant is not important to you. Even your favourite restaurant isn’t. If it shuts down tomorrow, very little will change in your life. You’ll find some other favourite restaurant, and, perhaps, remember the old one once in a while.

But the restaurant is very important to its owner, to its waiters and cooks and cleaners. To its suppliers. To its creditors.

For them it does matter whether it’s doing well or badly.

Or take your maid. Her work is unimportant. If she doesn’t show up one day, you can do the work yourself. Or not do it at all. If she works sloppily, or is absent too often, you can easily replace her.

But her work is very important to her.

One wage less may be the difference between a full stomach and hunger. Or keeping her children in school and dooming them to a life as bleak as her own. She better take her work very seriously.

Just as I must take my work, and myself, seriously. Regardless of its worth to my client, to the economy, to humanity, and to history of the universe.

None of them are responsible for me.

Only I am.

Besides, if it has to be done, why not do it well? If you’re going to spend lots of time and energy doing this job, and you can’t immediately switch to saving the world, why not save your spirit by taking your work seriously.

Look at it this way: If you take up an account where your client feels your work is not important, you’re looking for trouble; but if you think your work is not important, you’re staring at disaster.

Respond and be damned

My colleagues got a very fancy invitation from HP about their new cost-effective technology. Beautiful graphics, amazing personalisation.

But when the got there, on the evening of the 20:20 final, no less, they met reality.

The presentation was ok. No problem there.

But the sales representative was most uninformed and unhelpful, though my colleagues were keen to know more. He didn’t even take their business cards. Wonder why they bothered to spend the thousands?

In leaps and bounds…

“In India, we’re skipping technologies.”

“Forget everything. Everything’s changed.”

“Traditional advertising is dead.”

“Direct mail never took off and now it’s too late.”

It drones on and on.

Blanket statements with the surety of the sun’s rising in the east.

And what are they backed with? The ‘fact’ that we now have 147 million mobile subscribers in India. (http://www.coai.in/archives_statistics_2007_q3.htm)

This one statistic is supposed to be symbolic of all that is good and great in emerging India.

Frankly, that ‘fact’ is dubious. I bet we neither understand nor report churn correctly. I guess that 147 figure overestimates the subscriber base by at least 1/3.

Even if it was right, and we threw in all the telephones and Internet connections and what have you, you get a tele-density of 10 to 12%.

Big deal.

Actually, big shame.

It’s like celebrating progress in literacy when every second Indian can’t read, or, for that matter, in economic growth, when one out of four lives below the poverty line.

But I digress.

My main point here is the absurdity of taking one statistic, no matter how impressive, as the basis of a universal judgement. One Indian company buys a western one, and India conquers the word. One Rolls Royse sells somewhere in the back of beyond and we’re all maharajas. One NRI author in English wins a prize and we acquire a voice, at last. The literature of our 25 languages doesn’t count. Never did.

You hear this logical pole-vaulting in meeting after meeting. If a Western person is present, the absurdity attains insanity.

Nobody asks, “What are the facts of this case? Can we see them first?”

70% are businessmen

I won’t have believed this had I not seen this.

One of India’s largest companies did a customer ‘survey’ for one of their new brands. The largest proportion in the finding was 70%: 70% of the buyers who agreed to be surveyed were businessmen.

The upper confidence level for that fraction (at 95% confidence level) is 90%; the lower confidence level is 50%; the figure is meaningless.

Yet this company will use this to take decisions involving tens of thousands.

The new consumer?

Open any book on marketing and it will tell you that the consumer has changed. She won’t fit into stereotypes any more, has a mind of her own, is adapting technology, and the rest.

In other words, mother was a cardboard cut-out but the ‘significant other’ is a real human being. Or a hyper-real human being. Or is whatever inane that you heard in the party last night.

How did the ‘paradigm shift’ happen? Was the Web suddenly able to connect purchases to people and shatter stereotypes? Possibly.

Or are marketers waking up to something that direct mail people knew all along: Psychographics is nothing; demographics is nothing; list is everything.

Was there any reason to believe that consumers ceased being different and diverse and interesting and unpredictable and neatly slotted themselves into segments? Why did the segments exist? To describe neighbourhoods (for distribution) or media (for advertising) or markets overall (for planning products and fixing prices)? Which of these really confirmed to type? Niche B2B magazines maybe? Yet we thought in segments and profiles, never asking which ones we fit into?

Most probably we needed ‘something’ to think on, and the stereotype was that something, a comforting explanation not unlike primitive man’s lava demons and rain gods.

Worth no more than…

We were talking to an HR executive recently, and came across something quite horrifying. The conversation went like this:

“How did you find Mr X, who I had recommended for the loyalty manager’s post?”

“Oh, he wasn’t any good. Incidentally, another chap from your office turned up on his own, Mr Y. He was ok, but he wanted Rs 12 lakh (1.2 hundred thousand). We reckoned that he was worth Rs 10 lakh, at most.”

“Who did you take ultimately?”

“Mr Z. He has 15 years’ experience, and came for 18 lakhs.”

We couldn’t believe our ears. How can you have salaries as different as Rs 10 lakh and Rs 18 lakh for the same position! One expects a range of ± 10%, but +80%! The profiles and responsibilities have to be very different for that to make sense. Were they?

Because if they weren’t, it tells you a good deal about how companies value CRM and evaluate CRM managers.

Who do we send the cake to?

Meet any B2B marketing manager and about the second thing he tells you is that he wants to do CRM with his customers.

“What exactly?”

“Send cakes and cards on birthdays. Take the relationship to the next level. There’s so much you can do…”

(To yourself) “Can’t think of one thing I want any of my vendors and suppliers to do for me except do my work, and not overcharge me – but maybe I’m ultra-professional.”

(To him) “Of course, of course, there’s so much one can do.”

“Yes, but you see the problem is that we don’t know who to send the cake to. The person who books the call may be just a flunkey, with no say in the decision. We want to reach out to the decision makers and influencers (with cakes). We have to do the ‘mapping’.”

And so it goes on.

While you wonder what stops them for doing the far easier job of sending B2B offers and deals, which, if they are meaningful, should land up on decision-makers’ desks.

Then you realise you are seeing a replay of one of our favourite excuses: Because the impossible cannot be achieved, the obvious shouldn’t be attempted.

We Indians are great at ‘change at the grassroots’ and ‘rethinking the entire structure’. No doubt these are necessary. But what are to do till we do these? Twiddle our thumbs?

What can you say about this man?

“He has bought Brand A. What does that tell you about him?” How many times have you heard this question? How many times have you had to made up a wonderful pen picture of this customer, based on this one single purchase and agreeing with brand manager’s reading of who constitute his market?

And how many times have you told yourself that this Sherlock Holmes act is totally absurd?

Holmes would at least have a well-used object, with plenty of tell-tale marks on it, to base his deductions on. All you have is a single purchase. And some completely unsubstantiated assumptions.

Yet brands’ creative and media plans are based on these mental gymnastics.

Is it so difficult to say, “The only thing we can tell about the customer is that he can, most probably, afford this brand. If we have additional data on customers, we can probably hazard a few more guesses. For instance, if we know that 67% of customers are Sindhi grandfathers with four-and-a-half gold-filled teeth, we can say, ‘There’s a 67% chance that our new friend is a Sindhi grandfather with four-and-a-half gold teeth.’ Beyond that we can’t say anything.”?

Why must we know our customers profiles? Why can’t we just restrict our interest to the whys and wherefores of their liking our brand?

We use many brands ourselves: In how many cases do we fit those brands’ (apparent) target markets? Or are we ‘beyond marketing’, non-slot-able, unique, different?

Lend your card

Would it make sense to ask loyalty programme members to lend their cards to friends and relatives during festive seasons? If there are exclusive offers to cardholders, and the primary purpose of these offers are to hike sales among heavy users, not necessarily to curry favour among them (‘Here’s your bulk discount’ vs. ‘Something special for someone special’), loyalty cards can become, in effect, reusable discount coupons. Members won’t, of course, mind some extra points on their friends’ purchases.

In short, card lending can do, more or less, what a referral programme does.

There are three immediately discernable drawbacks though:

(a) We may not get the card borrowers’ data, as we’d do in a referral programme;

(b) The card borrowers may be lost as prospects to the loyalty programme (Why should I become a member when I can enjoy membership benefits by flashing my friend’s card? Well, because you won’t get points. But I don’t buy often enough to collect very many of them. In that case, both sides are perhaps better off with you not having a card.); and

(c) The members’ data can get somewhat contaminated (Data says grandmother is buying itty-bitty bikinis; in reality, her next-door neighbour bought them, while swiping her card. This may not be so horrible though, as long as grandma doesn’t mind passing on the bikini catalogues, sent as a result of this purchase, to her neighbour.)

I ‘eurekad’ when I read Caples the first time, but when I started reading again! –

John Caples’s Tested Advertising Methods is a book I will unhesitatingly recommend to any copywriter. As I will recommend his How to Make Your Advertising Make Money and Making Ads Pay.

So what I am about to write is, for me, sacrilege. Yet it must be committed.

The tests that Caples talks about leave a lot to be desired. I was just going through Tested Adverting Methods (5^th edition, revised by Fred E. Hahn [a revision that does it only harm]) again, and found the inadequacy of the data particularly puzzling.

Take the famous example where Caples says changing an ad headline from “Repair Cars – quickly, easily, right” to “Fix Cars – quickly, easily, right” increased response by 20%. He gives no information about what the actual numbers or percentages were, or where the ad came out.

So let’s suspend belief for a while and pick some numbers out of the Web.

The average weekday circulation of a newspaper in the US (whatever that is supposed to mean!) in 1940 was 21,902 and the Sunday circulation was 61,659 (Please see this section of The State of the News Media 2004 report at journalism.org).

Tested Advertising Methods came out in 1932, so here are our assumptions: (a) The circulation was not too different in 1932 (we have no reason to do that, but the data at the site is only till 1940) and (b) Readership was equal to circulation (again, a rather silly assumption, but the purpose of this to explore a possibility and not to prove a point).

The situation we can imagine goes like this:

The ‘repair’ ad could have pulled up to 201 responses

And the ‘fix’ ad 20% more, that is, 241 responses

Without the response rates being significantly different (at a 5% level of significance).

Had the ad come out on an average Sunday newspaper, the responses could have gone up to 209 and 250, respectively, without the response rates being significantly different.

The same complaint can be made against the comparison between “Save one gallon in every ten” and “Car owners! Save one gallon of gas in every ten” where, on testing in a daily newspaper, the latter pulled 20% better than the former.

Another famous example is the one where “Hay Fever” pulls 297 sample requests while “Dry Up Hay Fever” pulls 380, a ‘27% increase’. The increase in response rate (assuming the ads came out in average newspapers on weekdays) could have been between 0.15% and 0.61%.

In quite a few cases, neither response rates nor responses have been quoted; we’re simply told A did better than B.

Now, if the differences in response rates were not always significant, from either a statistical or business perspective, the businesses involved in those testing decisions would not have gained or lost much.

The trouble lies elsewhere, with direct marketing copywriters who believed the ‘tested’ fact that ‘straight and simple always out-pulls the creative’ and put their own careers into jeopardy, because that belief is almost always seen as an excuse for lack of talent.

To all such writers, and to writers who have not yet formed their beliefs, I would recommend this site: Statistics Every Writer Should Know. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but none at all can be disastrous.

PS: I used an Excel template from Aczel & Sounderpandian for my calculations. My calculations are at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd3bjnd7_28rt37t and the templates are available here.