Nevermind the Strategy – Watch the Little Details

Marketing is often compared to war, and there is much pretentious talk about strategy, conquests, territory and so forth.

That is one reason why I have spent years reading about great generals. IT has taught me a lot.

Many people think the Duke of Marlborough – an ancestor of Winston Churchill –  was England’s greatest ever general.

He was obsessed with minutiae. Before his greatest-ever victory, Blenheim, he made sure all his men had fresh boots and a meal of bread and soup.

The victor of the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, when asked for the secret of his success, replied, “Attention to detail.”

As for Napoleon, in Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace that his defeated opponents at Austerlitz relied on “the new science of strategy.” But Napoleon was most influenced by a book called An Essay on Tactics by the Comte de Guibert.

This brings me to just about the most basic tactic in marketing strategy: replying to customers.

The plain fact is that many firms are either not very good or completely useless at it.  This means many of the billions thrown at marketing has had little effect. In fact it may even do damage

Majestic sloth and incompetence

In a U.K. survey a while ago 100 mail order firms in 10 market sectors were asked via email for their printed catalogue or brochure.

34% never even replied, and of those that did, average response time was nearly 4.5 days.  Only 18% bothered to personalize the reply.

Don’t you find that terrifying? It implies that over a third of all direct response advertising is wasted.

It’s actually even worse. You are better off not advertising at all than advertising, then not replying. At least if you do nothing you are not angering people.

Failing to personalise lowers your likely conversion rate; and every day you delay replying cuts your eventual conversion rate.

As direct marketing – online or off – has become more accepted (it’s far bigger now than advertising) it has drifted away from practicality.

In earlier days, either you got sales – or you got fired. Now there are scores of courses, diplomas and so forth – but far too many idle quasi-intellectual plonkers taking them.

Try this little experiment

You might imagine that with the growing pervasiveness of the internet, where everything can be measured, things would improve. Far from it, as you will find if you conduct a little experiment .

Take any ten websites at random. Go on them and see if you immediately see an offer of something helpful. If not, they are missing tricks. Then see what they send you.  Well, is it helpful – or just sales waffle?

Then wait and see how they follow up, and for how long. They should keep at you until you either buy or unsubscribe

Unfortunately the people who do these things best are the rogue internet “You’ll be rich in three weeks” scamsters. Most ordinary marketers are utterly useless

Returning to the Duke of Wellington: when he was reviewing new recruits in the Peninsular War he said to one of his aides, “I don’t know what they’ll do to the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.”

Of course, in those days the army recruited drunks and criminals from the gutters. But at least they were very good at killing people.

– Drayton