Blog: David Frankland

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Shooting at Lighthouses - A Lesson for Marketers

Jun 28 2010

A colleague of mine has two chidren - ages 8 and 5 – with no plans to increase the size of her brood.  So you can imagine her surprise when she received a box from a leading baby food manufacturer that contained five samples and a letter, which welcomed her to their loyalty program and indicated that she would be receiving additional samples and offers in the coming months. And, then they came – direct mail pieces with diaper samples, coupons and other goodies - at least eight in total.

Talk about an expensive “mistake” for the manufacturer. Who knows how my colleague ended up on this particular marketing list, which was obviously geared towards a particular demographic (i.e., women with babies), but I'm pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who ended up on the list erroneously.

Which leads me to the topic of this blog post – how do companies avoid these marketing blunders, which can be costly in terms of both reputation and hard dollars?  The answer will be revealed in the video clip below.

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Requiem for the NCDM?

Dec 15 2009

I attended the recent NDCM (National Center for Database Marketing conference) in Las Vegas last week, after a gap of many years, the triggering event being the fact that I was on a keynote panel being moderated by David Frankland of Forrester Research.  Attending the event after this multi-year hiatus and, particularly,  on the tenth year anniversary of a keynote address I had given there after I had started Quaero in 1999, I was struck by the changes in the conference over the years.    It is, to state the obvious for those who have been attending for many years, much smaller than it used to be.   I would guess a fourth or even a fifth of the size that it was ten years ago.  When you consider the fact that there used to be two NCDMs a year at that time versus just one this year, that is quite a precipitous fall.  Given the revolutionary changes in marketing over the past ten years, one would have expected quite the opposite.    The NCDM has always been focused on the technology aspects of direct marketing and technology has been the driver behind many of the changes in marketing in recent years.   

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