A selection of thought pieces on various issues in and around the disciplines of marketing.
With less time to process all this impeccable logic into two-stage flattery and recognition, even the loveliest descriptions quickly become little more than a mushy word soup, just as Jane Austen would have become to our Boomer parents and grandparents. How can we continue to assume that flattery gets you everywhere, if you don't have time to do all that? More recently, all we really have time for is just to tell people what to do.
As any superhero aficionado will tell you, “with great power, comes great responsibility”. Very often, the ability to manipulate a database of tens - or even hundreds - of thousands of customers feels like an awesome power. It certainly provides a level of insight and understanding that’s difficult to gain in any other way. It’s therefore every marketer’s responsibility to make those insights matter, by informing the very best content it can.
I'd love to explain to him the parallels between his industry and mine: the intricacies of data, profiling and algorithms. With the arrogance of (relative) youth, I might expect the 'wonders' of the digital age to blow his Victorian mind. I'd tell him how confidently I could pinpoint the addresses of all the greenhouse-owning pensioners in Standish, based on a few data sources and the internet. I'd like to think he'd tell me I'd "ne'er do it".
There’s nothing wrong with mailing across multiple axes of segmentation, as long as the hierarchy is established (if a customer qualifies for a segment in each method, which one wins and which method is left with the rest?) and as long as each segment is performing well. Curves which become too horizontal may still be predictive at the level of each category but also show that the method itself has begun to lose its predictiveness at that point. Thought should be given to the point in the list/on the axis at which one model is abandoned and another is given free rein to replace it.
I won’t lie, there’s a bit of buzzword-heavy guff in it - the type that often gives Marketing its ‘fluffy’, superficial stereotype. Nevertheless, there’s an important point to be made here. Here's my (less guff-ridden) translation:
Just over a decade ago, I was honoured to be asked to speak at the National Equine Forum, one of the most prestigious events in the horse industry. The event was attended, as usual, by HRH The Process Royal. and, unusually, would be held at The Royal Society in London. My speech was entitled 'How to Run a Successful Equine Business in a Recession' and, as a speaker, I was asked to meet Princess Anne afterwards - she was very complimentary, by the way.
Introduction “The Impotence of Being Earnest” I believe it was Søren Kierkegaard who once said “If you label me, you negate me”. Already, I’m sensing you’re rolling your eyes at the audacity of my quoting a 19th-century Danish philosopher, without any warning. “Oh no, here we go. What an absolute [insert insult of choice]”. Hold …
Resonation 
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