Pratibha and Nabanita

“May is (gap) speak to (gap) ...Pratibha Chatterjee?” “May is (gap) speak to (gap) Na-ban-nita Chodry?” And these are pardonable ones.

...Now pabitra is a common word. Even the smallest vocabularies contain it. It occurs in all Indian languages, and is pronounced in the same way in all of them. (Bengalis pronounce it as pobitro, but that’s a minor point.) Admittedly, it is not a common first name.

While Nabanita is quite popular in Bengal as a feminine first name, I am yet to come across a non-Bengali with this name. On the other hand, its masculine version, Navneet, is hardly rare outside Bengal. In fact Navneet Publications dominates the guide book business in Central India.

So why do tele-callers mispronounce these two simple words.

I have several hypotheses, all of which are probably true:

1. The brand is incredibly sharp. This is a sales tactic. By mispronouncing the consumer’s name, the brand, though its representative, the tele-caller, signals, right at the beginning of the conversation, who is the boss.

2. The brand is insufferably stupid. To a consumer, his name, not Coca-Cola’s is the world’s most valuable brand. But the brand doesn’t understand this simple thing.

3. The brand is impossibly ignorant. Basic stats can help rank prospects, prioritise calls, and humanise the load on tele-callers, so that they can, as a minimum, read the suspect’s names in their heads before calling him. And this is not just about improving manners; it may improve efficiency and conversions too.

Unfortunately, the brand and its church measure work in exertion, not results. So they must shackle tele-callers to call quotas, and whip them with auto-calling software. It’s not very different, basically, from judging a bowler purely by balls bowled, assuming that it has a very simple and sure correlation with wickets taken ("All it takes is hard work").

Sex awards

Let’s say you hold a contest for performance in bed. And in your contest the yardstick isn’t actual prowess beneath the sheets but good looks.

Now that would be quite a logical thing to do provided (a) you could define and compare ‘performance’; (b) you know exactly how performance depends on looks; and (c) you can also define and compare ‘looks’.

For the second condition to hold all your judges should go to bed with all your contestants, in some sort of round-ribbon contest.

Immoral? Maybe. Absurd? Probably. Worthwhile? Almost certainly not.

Yet we hold ad and DM award contests every second weekend. “Wait a moment,” you say, “How dare you compare hypothetical judges of a ridiculous contest with industry experts evaluating the year’s best work?”

It’s admittedly irreverent, yet, aside from that, are the two situations that different?

The hunt and the carcass

You spend millions on ads, on sales promotion, on dealer deals, on salesmen’s bonuses and on everything your MBA course taught you to spend. The customer buys.

And you promptly banish him to a ‘database’ where his name is misspelt, his address is unreachable, and his email id bound to bounce. You probably get the phone number right - that’s the one he prayed you’d get wrong.

He finds it more than a trifle ironical that he who was so valuable as long as he didn’t buy became so completely worthless the moment he paid you money.

He doesn’t understand the marketing mind. The hunt is for its own sake; then the carcass rots.

Probability in direct marketing

I have put up some calculations at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjtNNMP33Dgum6Yup4umFMw.

It tries to answer a simple question: ‘Would it make sense to mail again?’ using simple probability with some almost arbitrary assumptions. The results are interesting.

Perhaps we’d come the same conclusions by applying simple statistics. Nonetheless, I wonder why direct marketing books don’t include anything on probability. Will it not help in planning? Can anyone suggest some good books or sites on the application of probability, especially basic probability (the equivalent of business statistics), to marketing in general and direct marketing in particular?

The economics of outsourcing

If Indians are to supply creative or analytics services to the West, they must do so at a small fraction of Western rates. Otherwise, the work wouldn’t exist. There would be no cost advantage. Sounds logical.

But does a Western copywriter or analyst living in a village charge less than his counterparts in cities (I assume it costs less to live in a village than in a city)? Where does the logic of the factory manufacturing end and that of professional services begin? Which universal and basic economic law am I breaking by asking this question?

How about training?

Ever heard a CRM saying that training his staff to be courteous, considerate and proactive can be the best CRM for his customers? I haven’t. Would that not cost a lot less than a loyalty programme? Most probably, yes. Wouldn’t it have a better chance of delivering results? Most probably, yes. Would that have improved morale enormously? Most probably, yes. Do they do all they can already?

You buy the most you need the least

The man with the biggest library buys more books. The man with the most suits buys more suits. Is this simply ‘collecting’? Why do people collect? Why are the best customers in a category the people who need it the least? Is this babble or something worth thinking about?

The dinosaur’s thumb

An archaeologist would probably be able to tell you a dinosaur’s dietary preferences by studying its fossilised thumb, but do we really believe we can profile a live person by a single purchase? Are brands that strong that their purchase decides your personality? What many people does the manager average to create his ‘typical buyer’? Why are we so sure that being able to describe every detail about the ‘typical buyer’ will open the lock to untold riches?

Has anyone researched the gaps between marketers’ pictures of their market and reality? I strongly suspect it’d make revealing, if not amusing, reading.

What will you do if you know?

Will you build a factory if you didn’t know what you’ll make in it?

Or open a shop without deciding what to sell?

Or employ an executive without a defined job profile?

Yet it is routine to find marketers who want to launch a loyalty programme with nothing more than the vaguest aims about loyalty, repeat purchase and data collection. Can they not put down a simple wish-list? Wonder how the rest of their marketing runs.

Worshipping response

Every direct marketing book and website venerates response rate and rightly so. Yet response is to direct marketing what score is to cricket. The real learning is in the journey to response: A mere reading of scores tells next to nothing.

The sensible student pays attention to every ball and stroke, not just their totaled result. I remember Sunil Gavaskar rate a match-saving 50 above all his innings, because he scored it under heavy pressure, on a bad wicket. During my childhood, Sportstar would bring out a series called ‘Their Greatest Moment’. In many cases, this moment wouldn’t be that of their biggest victory, but their most difficult one.

Another statistic that does the rounds – I don’t know if it has any basis in fact – is that Sachin Tendulkar rarely scored big in matches India won. Even if this is true, shouldn’t one also look at matches (he may have) saved?

All-data-zero-information is as harmful as no-data-all-opinion. Perhaps more so, because data makes everything seem very systematic and scientific, therefore replicable. Before you realise, an observation becomes an empirical law (We call these rules of the thumb).

Thankfully, there are a few first-class case studies that include sufficient details. Unfortunately, they are vastly outnumbered by case-lets that reveal little but damage much.